1996
Publish Date: 8/8/18
Last Edited: 8/8/18
Disclaimer: Everything recognizably canon or otherwise accepted as native to Rowling's world is not mine. I receive no monetary benefits from this work.
Other disclaimer: I'm from the States. The vast majority of characters and settings in this work are distinctly British. Please Brit-pick. I am honing my craft here, branching beyond my comfort zone in order to smooth out my own weaknesses. I wish devoutly I could present a perfectly authentic voice, but I must accept my handicap in this regard and welcome any and all help as it comes.
Summary: Voldemort makes a deal with Death to go back in time and murder the Potters before Harry can be born. Harry is the only one who can protect them.
Rating: T
Warnings:
- I don't censor language.
- There will be violence, possibly even torture, but no unnecessary gore.
- Child neglect/abuse mentioned.
- Although this is rated T, there will be mature psychological and philosophical themes. No character bashing, no superpowers, no evil!good nonsense, no OoC-ness, etc.
- Post OotP. Parallels HBP and DH in terms of major character developments, horcruxes, Hallows, and so on, but the plot of 1996 is mine and will diverge more and more.
- It hurts my creative sensibilities a bit to do this, but in order to postpone any questions you may have: all will be explained in full, eventually. I try not to leave loose ends or plot holes. I detest slow-building filler, so the first few chapters may seem a bit disorienting, as we jump as close to the action as we can. After this little intro, Harry will already be in 1976, with four months of training and other experiences behind him; we'll have relevant flashbacks only as his mission makes him think of them.
I: Hell Is For Children
The seventeenth time Harry sinks into Voldemort's mind through his dreams, he almost dies.
He's fallen deeper than he ever has before, so close he'd be breathing against Voldemort's brain if he were physical. Even the thought of this-and the hysterical hilarity bubbling within him because of it-cannot be allowed to be thought in this dreamscape. Harry is literally a heartbeat away from discovery. He instinctively ducks and rolls, as if on a broom, away from the physical sensation of his own terrified heart pounding against his throat. Somehow, Voldemort does not notice, and Harry is safe.
Until he looks through Voldemort's eyes. Harry wants to laugh, but that's not something Voldemort would do here. It's just -
Death takes the form of a balding, naked, pot-bellied man who stands a whopping three feet tall. A glowing, white hoop hangs from his left earlobe and his eyes are solid gold.
"You are disgusted," snarls a voice from somewhere beyond the dream, "and frightened. Not amused."
Harry has to focus all his will to obey the voice, which does not belong to Death or Voldemort. And anything that is not Death or Voldemort cannot be here, or else one or both of them would notice, and Harry forgets his own Self, his own ears, so the words of that other voice fall from the edges of the dream, unheard inside of it.
An echo of the mind behind the voice snakes a tendril of impatience into the scant space between Harry and Voldemort, brushing past the Dark Lord's earth-brown robes. Skillfully, the breeze of emotion is made native to Voldemort's own. With an additional sharp bite of annoyance at having had to employ such delicate mindwork, the hidden mind-echo (carefully unnamed even now) tugs sharply at Harry's memories, superimposing an image over Death's form.
The image lies just beyond Voldemort's reach, past the dream's edges yet omnipresently above and beneath it. It reminds Harry viscerally of a single moment in a graveyard two years ago, the first instant he glimpsed a shriveled, baby-shaped demon cradled in Wormtail's arms.
Rather than defend the memory from the other mind, Harry grasps for it. He reaches not the memory itself but deeper, into the combination of repulsion and terror it evokes in him. This he takes into himself. It is not a shield, but a transformation into something that does not need to be shielded.
Meanwhile, Voldemort postrates himself before the naked midget. "Your will is mine," he hisses. "There will be justice for what has been done to you."
Harry feels as if he is being split in a dozen directions. He is physically in two places at once. There is a familiar intruder guiding his emotions to carefully match Voldemort's, and half of his mind has to actively allow the intruder to have its way. The other half layers a thin fog of innocuous memory and thought around and within the intruder.
If Voldemort does discover Harry, he will only discover Harry, and even then, the most sensitive information in Harry's mind has been buried too deeply for him to find. Voldemort may attempt to rip Harry to pieces, but he won't learn anything from doing so. Meanwhile, Harry experiences Voldemort's thoughts, emotions, and physical senses as if they are his own. He barely hangs on to a thread of a separate identity. He's long lost the sense of what he is doing here, or how to escape.
Voldemort/Harry snidely regards Death with both fear and superiority as the little man laughs a laugh of high-pitched thunder. "If there were justice, I would take you now." Voldemort shivers. Death appears to enjoy this. "But you are useful," Death continues. "Accomplish this task. Correct the aberrance of nature that was catalyzed by a mother's sacrifice. Prevent the birth of your prophesied nemesis. After that..." Death laughs again. "Good luck."
"Of course," Voldemort simpers. He raises an athame over his hand and slashes a line precisely across his palm. Harry's mind flinches from the pain; Voldemort hesitates, confused, before continuing, "In blood, I accept the terms of our contract."
Death grasps Voldemort's bloody hand. The moment he does, he dissolves into smoke.
Before dissipating, the smoke whispers, laughing, "You are being watched, my servant."
Harry's scar explodes with pain. Voldemort's fury is like fire crackling down the center of Harry's skull. Even with help, he cannot prevent the murderer from feeling his panic.
"Potter," snarls Voldemort venomously.
A sledgehammer of mental will slams into Harry, crippling him.
"Potter," echoes another voice, somewhere underneath the layers of Harry's identity. "POTTER!Wake up! WAKE, damn you!"
But Harry can barely hear. Voldemort smashes another blow into Harry, viciously aiming to crush him into oblivion.
A silver doe appears. It snatches a memory from somewhere and throws it in front of Harry. In it, Harry heroically vomits a golden snitch into his hands. A phantom stadium erupts in adulation. Ron and Hermione are just visible in the Gryffindor section, jumping up and down, cheering. Victory, elation, and a sense of belonging—finally, he's found a home—shunt aside pain and fear.
Voldemort withdraws briefly, taken aback.
Freed, Harry gathers himself—all of himself—and yanks it away from the menacing mind of the glorified terrorist.
Gasping, Harry sits up in his ratty old bed in Number Four, Privet Drive. His forehead feels like someone took a chainsaw to it. He claws at it, scratching, get it off, getitoff make it stop—
Someone pulls his hands away and holds them so tightly Harry loses feeling in his fingers.
"Clear your mind, Potter!"
Harry thinks of flying, of leaving all care and worries on the ground; he forces that feeling of vertigo into his gut, imagines wind in his hair, cold and biting, roaring louder than Voldemort's incensed screams. There's a broom underneath him, sturdy, dependable, and he grips it with all his might; he leans forward and shoots off like a javelin.
The pain fades to a dull throb. Voldemort's voice disappears.
When he catches his breath, Harry opens his eyes. Severus Snape is watching him intently. Harry rears back, unnerved by the intensity in those coal-black eyes. Apparently satisfied, Snape releases Harry's hands. Harry winces, flexing and rubbing them together, trying to regain feeling.
Snape heaves an exasperated sigh. "How many times—"
"I know," Harry interrrupts, annoyed. "I know, okay?" He runs a shaky, tingling hand through his hair. "Fuck, that was close."
The fact that Snape does not reprimand his language confirms the gravity of the situation. The foreboding Potions Professor rises from the foot of Harry's bed and glares down his hooked nose at him. "I must speak to Dumbledore before..."
He stops abruptly, paling. His right hand clenches his left forearm tightly.
Harry stares at where he knows the Dark Mark is covered by black robes. He meets Snape's stony gaze. "Before that happens?" Harry finishes darkly.
Snape snarls wordlessly. "Contact no one, Potter. Keep what we have learned to yourself until I can report to the Order."
"But—"
"No one, Potter!"
"Yes, sir," Harry mutters mutinously to his bedspread.
Snape hisses in pain, clenching his arm harder. "You will be vulnerable for some time. Do not sleep for at least sixteen hours. Do not leave this room. Be productive and finish your blasted homework. Whatever is decided, I will ensure you are informed. Above all, speak to—"
"No one. Got it."
With one last dark glare, Snape sweeps from the bedroom, robes flowing behind him.
Harry exhales sharply as he collapses into the pillows behind him.
Existence just got more complicated, even for him. He's screwed.
#
Harry waits in agony for ten days. He weeds the Dursleys' garden. He cooks the special meals—lean protein, whole carbs, dark greens—prescribed by the dietician concerned for Dudley's heart health and digs scraps out of the bin in the evenings when the Dursleys are watching the telly. He scrubs every surface of the house until it sparkles. He avoids actual interaction with his relatives like they have the plague, certain that as raw as he's feeling since Legilimizing Voldemort, something inside him will combust and make him vulnerable to mental attack at the slightest provocation.
And he lies awake at night, terrified that Voldemort will capitalize on their connection no matter how well Harry clears his mind. He worries about the murderer's contract with Death. He needs to know what's being done about it. He scours The Daily Prophet for news, but finds only Ministry propaganda, their empty promises of safety, and glossed-over snippets of what could be interpreted to have been Death Eater attacks and mysterious disappearances.
Finally, Hedwig returns from a hunt early one evening with a note.
Pack your things. —HBP
Inordinately relieved that his hated professor is still alive, Harry does as told. He shoves the odds and ends scattered around his room into his trunk—it only takes twenty minutes. After that, he sits on the trunk for two hours from where he'd used his body weight to close it, meditating on the finer aspects of Wronski feints, before the crack of Apparation startles him to stand.
Harry clenches his wand in a sweaty palm as he peers out his window at pitch darkness. A cloaked figure approaches Number Four's front door. He scrambles out of his bedroom to wait tensely at the top of the stairs. There's a knock. Uncle Vernon grumbles. Aunt Petunia opens the door. She shrieks.
Harry bounds down the stairs, wand aloft. He relaxes bonelessly into the bannister in relief when Dumbledore's silver beard and twinkling eyes become visible.
#
After convincing a portly old professor to come out of retirement with nothing but an awkward smile, Harry follows Dumbledore into the Headmaster's office, where several witches and wizards are waiting for them.
"Harry!" Mrs. Weasley exclaims, rising from the chintz loveseat she was sharing with her husband to crush Harry in her arms. "What are you doing here? Oh, those Muggles never seem to know how to feed a growing boy! How have you been, dear? Headmaster, why is he here?"
"Molly." The headmaster raises a black, skeletal hand.
Mrs. Weasley reluctantly lets Harry go. She frowns severely, clearly sensing that she won't like what Dumbledore's about to say.
"Molly, Harry has a critical place in our meeting today."
Harry finally takes a moment to look around. He identifies every Order member he can remember, plus a few more. Snape stands facing the fireplace, hands clasped behind his tall, stiff back. The Weasley twins slump together on an oversized couch with their older brothers. Tonks, with oddly colorless, mousy hair, stands opposite the room from Remus, who leans against a shelf of whirring instruments. Professor McGonagall, in a tartan robe, sits primly in a straight-backed chair in front of Dumbledore's large desk; her lip is curled in disapproval at Harry. Possibly a couple dozen more witches and wizards recline in comfortable chairs and cushions crowded with rather uncomfortable density around the office.
Harry's stomach drops when he realizes they haven't been told yet.
"Headmaster, he is just a boy! He has no place fighting a war—"
Again, the headmaster raises his hand. "Please, Molly, have a seat."
As the matriarch sits, Mad-Eye Moody clears his throat. "I agree with her. Potter shouldn't be here."
"While Potter," Snape drawls without turning around, "is undoubtedly too infantile to participate in a serious discussion," Harry scoffs, but Snape ignores him, continuing without pause; "the headmaster has decreed that he must be here. Therefore, he is. Shall we move on?"
"Thank you, Severus," says Dumbledore. He sits at his desk and steeples his fingers.
A padded chair pops into existence directly behind Harry. He tries not to look as awkward as he feels with all these eyes on him as he folds his legs into it.
Snape finally turns around. Harry bites back a startled swear: a fresh, mottled scar now stretches from the professor's forehead in a straight line to the bottom of his jaw. It bisects his left eyebrow, but his eye seems remarkably intact. No one else seems surprised by this. Was he discovered by Voldemort after all?
"A week into the holiday," he begins, ignoring Harry, "I learned of a plot by the Dark Lord that could potentially end the war in his favor." Dead silence greets his declaration. "Per the headmaster's orders," he sneers, "I instructed Potter in Legilimency so he could use his connection to the Dark Lord to glean details of this plan."
Mrs. Weasley gasps in horror. Harry winces.
Snape spares a brief glare for her before saying, "Ten days ago, we succeeded.
"Mister Potter, if you would."
Harry quails under the combined weight of the Order members' gazes. "Erm," he stammers. "Yeah. We found out what he's up to."
Snape's glare deepens, made all the more imposing by his new scar. Harry can practically hear him thinking, Such eloquence, Potter.
Harry sits up straighter. "He's going to kill my parents. Again." At everyone's confusion, he elaborates, "In 1976."
Everyone, even the portraits, go very still, as if someone hit a pause button.
"Urlhardt's Fourth Law of Time," intoned a thin, aging wizard to Harry's right after a tense moment, "won't allow lynchpin changes, even if You-Know-Who can travel that far."
"Lynchpin?" asks a tiny witch standing beside Tonks.
"Things that matter." The wizard sighs impatiently, brushing lint off his charcoal robes. Harry wonders if he's an Unspeakable. "Normally, as with Time-Turners, minor changes can be affected, with no one but the traveler aware of the discrepancy. The traveler misplaces a brick, for instance, and it trips up some unsuspecting fellow," he scowls as if remembering a particular incident, "but he is unharmed, and goes on his merry way like nothing happened. Only the traveler is aware of the change, and it has no bearing on further events."
"The Potters' deaths matter," Kingsley Shacklebolt needlessly affirms.
"And the circumstances around the incident cannot change," nods the know-it-all.
"Perhaps a force stronger than Time is involved," suggests Professor McGonagall.
"Death," Harry interjects quickly, before anyone else can push new theories forward. Once again, all eyes turn on him. They still make him nervous, but this meeting will go nowhere as long as everyone is questioning whether or not Voldemort's plan is possible. "Voldemort—" several people flinched; "—did a kind of ritual that summoned a, erm..." He darted a pleading look at Snape, who rolled his eyes at him. Avatar, the word popped into his head. "An avatar," he said more firmly, "of Death. He made a contract: Death agreed to send him back, and Voldemort said he'd make things right for Death—you know, from when my mum made it so the Killing Curse wouldn't...well, kill me."
This last bit seems to be news to some of the Order members, as they appear confused; the rest, who understand what Harry's getting at, murmur amongst themselves, an angry and terrified buzz.
"I called this meeting today," says Dumbledore, raising his voice above the din, "to inform everyone of the situation—and our only viable solution."
Harry stiffens, focusing intently on the headmaster.
"Voldemort is constrained by the terms of his contract; he will not be able to do anything in the past other than try to kill the Potters and, secondarily, the Longbottoms." Almost everyone looks confused at this addition, but Dumbledore keeps going as if he doesn't notice, "Any agent we send to stop him, however, will be able to act and move about freely, provided doing so does not change our past.
"The nature of the magic this avatar will use to bend the laws of time—that is, of course, a combination of Primordial Inculpatory Judgment and Imbroglio Prescience—allows that Voldemort's entire essence will self-evidently grip its parallels in the past in order to travel. This is also why he can only go to 1976, no earlier, and no later, although I will need to conduct more research to determine the precise date."
Huh? Harry looks around and is gratified to note that the Order, with the exception of Snape and the wizard Harry thinks is an Unspeakable, seems to have understood about as much of that as Harry did—every third word or so.
"The advantage to us is this," continues Dumbledore. He gestures grandly at Harry. Harry hopes no one can see the nervous sweat beading on his forehead. "Harry's connection with Voldemort. At present, it is not strong enough for our purposes."
"But if we can strengthen it," murmurs the Unspeakable thoughtfully, "You-Know-Who will drag Mister Potter back in time with him."
"Wait, what?!" Harry yelps.
He's not the only one. Most of the adults seem to be of a mind that Harry going back in time is a bit counterproductive. How can he, a mere schoolboy, protect his parents? Who will protect him? Would he have to be disguised?
Dumbledore allows the hubbub to run its course. Gradually, the conversation shifts from incredulity to discussing ways to make it work against all odds.
Harry clenches a hand in his hair, a habit gleaned from hours of frustration working with Snape. He's fine under pressure, really. When Snape came to Number Four, scaring the Dursleys shitless (which immediately improved Harry's opinion of him), demanding that Harry learn how to attack Voldemort from a distance, Harry was all for it.
This is different. They're talking about his parents before they were even his parents, Neville's parents before the other boy was even a thought in their heads. Meeting them all, getting to know them, may be a dream come true … but what if he fails? He'll be alone. No one to turn to for help, as he always has in the past. No Fawkes swooping in to pluck out the eyes of the enemy, or Hermione to direct him through the time travel or impossible Tasks, or Order to come to his rescue when he does something unforgivably reckless and stupid—
"How much time do we have?" Moody growls rather abruptly, silencing the group. Harry releases his hair, leaving it messier than before.
"Death," Snape answers softly, "will be strongest on the longest night of the year."
"Then we have less than four months to train him for this mission," declares Moody.
Harry feels dizzy.
"That is why," Dumbledore speaks up again, "I felt it prudent to inform as many of our Order as we could, so that you may offer your skills to Harry and formulate an appropriate curriculum."
And now Harry feels like vomiting, as a couple dozen fully-trained wizards eye him as wolves circling a cornered deer.