Hey. So this is a story that only has two chapters written so far. This one and the one I'll post afterwards. Leave me a PM or a comment if you'd like more. See you guys, and happy reading.

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After years of trying my damnedest, I have succeeded in creating the conditions needed to make a second attempt in life. And many more after that. I will not go silently into the void until I feel I have done all I can in every way I can.

And before I go through with what I am about to attempt, I feel it would be best to recount my adventure from the very beginning. If I fail, I can at least fail knowing that my 173 years of life will not be forgotten so easily.

So, the beginning.

My time here began in the wonderful world of Magical Britain. On October 31st, 1970 I was born under the name Joseph Andrew Hawthorne. Born to what I would later learn to be a dying Pureblood family with me as its sole remaining member.

Now, even though I said we'd start at the beginning, we'll just skip over the first few years of me realizing where exactly I was, plotting to ensure my survival several years from then, the shame of wearing diapers, and the terrible existence that was being an adult man trapped inside of an infant. Instead, I'll summarize.

The first two years of my life were spent in the care of the Hawthorne family's only active house elf at the time. The rest of them were in what I liked to call 'hibernation mode' until I became old enough to take on the mantle of Lord Hawthorne.

It was just me and Tippy from the moment I was born and every day after that. And to make it easy on her, I was the best-behaved baby anyone could ever have. I ate when she fed me, I moved around so as to not have eternal baby fat later on, I cried only when I truly felt like shit, and when I actually shit I made sure to not be so fussy about it.

After those two years, I began my extensive education under the portraits of the various men and women that were the Lords and Ladies Hawthorne when they were alive. Interestingly enough, I found that the oldest among them was nearly two thousand years old.

That meant that the Hawthorne family had been in existence since the time that muggles began to fear magic and those who could use it.

The full story, according to said oldest portrait, was that her father, whose even older portrait was lost several centuries ago, preemptively hid his family away from the rest of the world when signs of magical intolerance and suppression began to make its way to their doorstep.

He and several other magical families formed a small underground community that would eventually be destroyed by the ones who feared them. Only four families managed to make it out alive; the Hawthornes, the Blacks, the Prewetts and the Weasleys.

I made sure to remember that, as well as the several dozen blood debts that both families owed the Hawthornes for sheltering them when they faced extinction. There was even a book of all the blood debts the Hawthornes were owed by many other families.

The only reason no one ever collected any of them was because the Hawthornes 'disappeared' in the last days of the Crusades. Everyone thought they were dead, and had completely forgotten about them.

And by the time 1972 rolled around, there were no witches, wizards, texts, or anything else from the crusades that knew about or held any information on any family that held the name Hawthorne.

And with that fresh in my mind, I decided then and there that I would be the one to bring the Hawthorne name back from the dead. Of course, this would only be a temporary revival. After the second war with Voldemort, I'd live out the rest of my days planning my family's return to obscurity.

It would take several hundred years and presumably multiple magical and non-magical wars to erase our mark on the world, but I still believe it can be done. And if not, then the next timeline I'm in will succeed where this one couldn't.

With the approach of the advancing technological world in mind, I was smart enough to recognize that being discovered was no longer mere possibility, as the portraits suggested.

But rather than explain it to them, I let them think that I agreed with their assessment of muggle capabilities and decided to just deal with that stubborn shitstorm later. I knew what battles to win and what ones to lose. It was just how dealing with them worked.

When I first came to this world, I only knew three things. One: I knew I had lived another life. A life where I grew up to be an old man and then reincarnated here after dying.

Two: The only thing I could remember about my old life was general information and that I loved the Harry Potter series. That was it. No family, friends, work, likes, hates, allergies. Nothing but out of context life lessons and Harry Potter related crap.

Let me tell you, it pissed me off something fierce in the beginning. But I worked through it with time, so it wasn't even a real issue.

And three: My mind was a malleable combination of adult and baby, because from the moment I woke up I had these baby instincts try to control me. Things that babies usually did when they were recently born.

Crying for my mother was one of the harder ones to resist, as was crying in general, but after days of fighting I managed to wrest control of my body from whatever used to be the baby part of my new brain.

This showed when I was learning from my ancestors for what felt like eternity but was actually, like, fifteen. It was a surprisingly long time. Well, it was a long time. But you never really realize how long it is until you live like a lonely scholar during all that time.

At first, I was unsure of how much I could learn from portraits. They were just portraits! Then I was unsure of how I could learn anything. I wasn't sure how my baby-man hybrid mind would affect my learning potential.

But then fifteen years passed, and I turned out to be a fucking rock star at magic, not to mention a jack of all trades.

I could cast silently, apparate and disapparate, a single hand movement and I let out powerful spells without the use of a wand, transforming into a Gray Wolf was the result of three frustrating years of trying and not being able to, and I apparently come from a long line of metamorphmagus.

The wizards in the books and movies didn't seem that amazing when I compared it to what I could do. But then again, not many of Britain's best made it out of the first war.

The day I turned seventeen, however, was the day my magic took a turn for the powerful. Becoming Lord Hawthorne meant that I needed to be powerful enough to protect my family from extinction.

So, as I put on the Hawthorne Family ring, the magic that surrounded the Hawthorne bloodline acted and did something I still haven't managed to understand past making my magic slightly more powerful.

With my full name now being Lord Joseph Andrew Hawthorne I was free to leave my family's ancestral home for the first time since I'd arrived. It felt slightly surreal. But I was never one to dwell on such fleeting feelings and went for it.

I said my goodbyes to the portraits of my parents and the rest of the family, packed enough clothes to last me several weeks without having to wash them, made sure Tippy was okay with remaining in the manor until I called for her, and then got the hell out of here.

After apparating out of the manor and into a cozy looking neighborhood, I combed the street looking for 4 Privet Drive. Not because I was looking for a seven-year-old Harry Potter, but because 5 Privet Drive was right next door and I was looking forward to seeing what my new home for the next four years looked like.