So, for those of you fortunate (or unfortunate, I'm not sure yet) enough to stumble across this fic be aware that this is my first Harry Potter fic. Hopefully I can avoid the more glaring mistakes made by writers new to the series, but no promises. If I screw something up in a spectacular enough fashion, leave me a message and I'll try to correct it.
Fair warning, I don't like Ron, and I have very ambivalent feelings about Ginny. As a result there is likely to be a certain amount of Weasley bashing once one or the other makes an appearance. Also I find Albus to be senile at best; you don't want to hear about the 'at worst.' Finally, I've found that the last two books in J.K.'s series aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Frankly, in terms of this fic, they have been entirely disregarded save for interesting and/or useful plot concepts. (Ex. There are no hallows in this fic)
In case it wasn't clear yet, I own nothing. I am simply a starving college student playing in other people's sandboxes.
XXXXX
Tempus Fugit
Chapter One
Harry stumbled out of the still smoking circle of grass and promptly tripped over the hem of his robes. Given that mere minutes before an observer would have been able to clearly see his dragon hide boots peeking out from under the lower edge, this was a cause of some concern. In fact, now that he had stopped to consider it, the fact that there was a certain amount of extra space in the aforementioned boots was troubling as well. Giving one last cough, Harry looked down at himself.
"Oh . . . this will be a bother, won't it?" he asked no one in particular as he took in his body's general appearance. Assuming that his clothing hadn't grown or something else equally strange as a result of the particularly reckless piece of magic he'd just performed, it appeared he'd lost something like a foot of height. Add to that the fact that his voice sounded odd to his own ears . . .
Alright, so his little trip had created problems. It wasn't like he was entirely unprepared to have to play catch as catch can with the consequences. He retrieved his wand, carefully tightening his holster to a snug fit in the process, and wordlessly cast an identification charm the Unspeakables had come up with to identify casualties on himself. The results were moderately surprising. His name was as expected, so were things like eye color, number of teeth, and the distance between his nostrils (though why the Unspeakables felt such information was necessary was beyond him). His age and height, though . . . he was fairly certain that he had not been a hundred fifty-seven and a half centimeters tall at age twelve. For a moment the part of his brain that liked to channel Hermione woke up and began to speculate about temporal regression and the effects of improved nutritional status on an earlier body-form before the rest of his consciousness bludgeoned it back into silence.
A second incantation and wand flick requested a situation report from the universe. Harry had cast the charm several dozen times before and the report always came back in seconds. This time it took more than five minutes, and the effort left him gasping. October twenty-fifth of the year 1981, which meant that the Fidelius was already up. For a moment Harry stood perfectly still before giving in to the urge to blast something.
A tree several meters in front of him fragmented as the Bombarda hit it. He cursed quietly but inventively for several moments. The damned spell had been supposed to drop him off in mid-September so he'd have more than a month to prepare for his showdown with Voldemort. That should have been more than adequate time to replace everything he'd brought along as party favors in case something about the trip through space-time had irreversibly scrambled something important about their function.
Now he barely had enough time to make sure they all still worked properly. Which lead to another problem. The original plan had involved an all-out physical and magical assault on old Snake Face supported by Harry's expertise in several accessory fields of magic. Just based on what had happened to his height, the circumstances he had depended on for such an attack to be viable were profoundly unlikely. Which meant plans A, B, and C were out the proverbial window. Harry let his eyes slip closed and began to plan.
XXXXX
Twelve hours later, Harry was still trying to come up with an idea that might actually work, though by that time he'd managed to sort out his trunk and get the tent he'd brought along set up and warded. Finally, Harry decided that what he was trying simply wasn't going to work, "It'd almost be easier to list everything that won't work!"
Which, now that he thought of it, wasn't a bad idea at all. At the very least it would help him focus on the task at hand instead of his general level of pissedoffedness.
So, he considered, given what happened to my reflexes, the sword is out. Which sucked. Really it did. Even though he'd been able to acquire the most expensive bit needed to form the blade himself, he'd still had to shell out the equivalent of two and a half million pounds to convince the goblins and dwarves to work together long enough to forge it for him.
Now and for the next year or two, that investment was absolutely worthless; until he could work back up to his previous level of strength and readjust his muscle memory for the changes in his size and balance the ninjato was nothing more than an expensive conversation piece. Likewise the matching gauntlets wouldn't fit until he grew back into them. That, in turn, meant no spell deflection or redirection. Harry grimaced in disgust at the realization. He'd have to shift his entire strategy to compensate for his reduced defensive abilities.
At least the robes are undiminished basilisk hide, he considered thankfully. He'd already used the fact that they were attuned to his magic to shrink them enough to fit properly on his smaller frame. The hooded robes were the best armor available on the planet and the way they were crafted meant that they covered him from shin to crown and exposed only his eyes, hands, and feet. Too bad the boots are dragon hide. I like those boots and it'll be two or three years before I can wear them again. Same as anything else he owned made of the material. Unlike the special basilisk hide his robes were made of, dragon hide resisted any and all spells placed on it. As a result, he couldn't adjust the size to fit his newly shrunken self.
Which reminds me, I can take my animagus abilities off the list too, Harry recalled regretfully. The same general situation applied to his self-transfiguration as it did to his bladework. His mind remembered the specific changes it was required to make to a body that no longer existed. He'd very nearly have to start from scratch, aside from knowing his form at least.
And if all that wasn't enough, his magical core was only slightly larger than it had been when he was twelve the first time. And of course he had his runes, for what good they would do him.
All together it meant that Harry wouldn't be able to simply charge in and overwhelm Voldemort with superior power and techniques. Which, again, sucked.
"So, I can't be a Griffindor," he said aloud, speaking to no one in particular, and, finally, a smile slid across his face as he remembered the sorting hat's words to him on his first day at Hogwarts lo those many years ago. "Looks like I'll just have to be a Slytherin."
XXXXX
Harry remained where he was, huddled under his father's invisibility cloak as close as he could get to the house his parents had lived in, or rather, given the games he'd played with temporal mechanics and causality, the house they still occupied.
Though since night had fallen and All Saints Day was mere hours away that might still be subject to change if things didn't go as they had in his own past. He'd spent the occasional hour in the last few weeks wondering if he'd stepped on a blade of grass wrong and insured that Voldemort would simply use Wormtail's position as secret keeper to ignore the Fidelius charm instead of arrogantly tearing it down like he had before. Or is that 'would have done?' 'will do?' Harry once again concluded that there needed to be an entire tense devoted to properly describing interactions and subjective viewpoints resulting from temporal manipulation.
Reflexively, Harry's hand slid to the wand holster on his wrist and checked the straps for tightness. When he realized he was fidgeting, he immediately forced his hands to stop before giving a small shrug and going back to inspecting the gear he'd carefully selected for this mission. Just as his left hand had checked the holster on his right wrist, so too did his right hand check the holster on his left wrist.
The three perfectly balanced Goblin-forged throwing knives were the only physical weapons he felt comfortable enough with using in his younger body to bother carrying. He'd carefully practiced with them almost constantly for two days to adjust his muscle memory so that he could draw them safely. Since all three of the knives had been impregnated with Basilisk venom, they were far more effective than a standard throwing blade. On the other hand, a simple slip while catching one of the blades from his quick-draw holster could kill him just as dead as a Killing curse to the face.
On the other hand, if he could remain unseen long enough, a single scratch from one of the knives would be enough to put Tommy-boy in a shallow grave. Not even the powerful dark rituals he had performed on himself would allow him to survive with the venom of a thousand year old Basilisk circulating through his veins.
Immediately afterwards, his hand dropped to the boxy potion holder on his right hip. Just like his robes, the combat holder was made of undiminished Basilisk hide and attuned to his magic so that he, and only he could open it. Of course the more unstable concoctions had been rendered worthless by overexposure to the concentrated magic his trip back in time had created, but several of the more subtle brews had survived intact. And one never knows when one might need a smokescreen or a glacis potion to alter the field of battle. Distractions, visual or otherwise were one of the few ways he'd managed to force Snake Face onto the ropes back uptime. The advantages that his constructed body gave, or rather, had given him could be turned to disadvantages. That, and there was just no downside to having a stockpile of healing potions on him at all times. Just wish I'd had enough time to brew immolation, asphyxiation, and explosive potions. Those hadn't survived the trip. On the other hand, the custom charm work on the holster had vanished them before they went off inside their containers. He was willing to take the good with the bad in that particular case. He didn't have Boom-in-a-bottle to throw at the Dark Lord. He also wasn't a finely dispersed cloud of suspended particulate matter. Fair trade.
The last bit of his gear was tucked into a socket on his belt on his left hip. It constituted his Gone To Hell plan. It was, in fact, how he'd managed to defeat the older and nastier Voldemort uptime once and for all and he really hoped he didn't have to use it here. It would constitute a huge advantage if Voldemort somehow managed to regain a body before he could manage to destroy all of Snake Face's Horcruxes. Besides, what the Dark Lord didn't know existed couldn't be thrown at his friends and allies.
The containment system had been designed by Luna and was vibrantly red and white with a self shrinking feature built into the button on the front. She'd also been kind enough to build it like a grenade rather than a traditional containment ward that one had to be standing practically on top of to open. It had gathered a lot of attention from professional Curse breakers even though more than half the muggleborns that looked at it broke into semi-hysterical laughter.
Harry couldn't help but smile at some of the memories. Some of his last truly good memories before everything had gone directly to hell. For a few minutes Harry allowed his attention to wander. When he sensed the Fidelius fall less than a hundred yards away it was almost a shock.
Harry concentrated on keeping a lock on the area where he'd felt the chain failure of the wards as he ran towards the location of the newly revealed Potter home. He rounded one last corner and had to suppress the urge to swear. In contrast his thoughts were almost calm. I wonder which blade of grass I stepped on to cause this.
The area in front of the house was packed uncomfortably full of Death Eaters with the Chief Death Eater and Pettigrew in front, each with a shield raised and deflecting spells they couldn't respond to from the left side of the ground floor and the right side of the second floor. Along with the bodies of a half-dozen death eaters who would never bother anyone again. Something about that struck him as odd. Unless the Butterfly Effect was substantially more powerful than he and Luna's notes thought it was, there should have been no way things could have changed this much in the short time since he'd arrived.
Still, his mind, trained by years of terrorist attacks and war began to catalogue the effect of the wards and their placement. Solid second layer wards, probably built around an entirely different wardstone given that they didn't fall when Tommy-boy overpowered the outer layer, and definitely inverted so they don't show up on a standard scan. As far as he knew, only the Goblins had ever mastered that particular trick which also explained why the Death Eaters weren't firing spells at them. Goblin wards had a built-in power tap that absorbed energy from most spells directed at them into fueling the ward. Also, Goblin wards implied that the wards had been placed before the Fidelius since Peter would have had to give the warding team the location of the house if they had been placed after. And given the dead Black Hats he had no idea the second layer wards were present. That meant that Harry had a unique opportunity.
It would take even a wizard of Voldemort's power some time to tear down wards he couldn't see, while under fire and he and all his followers were out in the open with only the low wall or whatever they could conjure for cover until he did take them down. I wish there were a few more of me. Catching the bastard and a goodly portion of his followers between a sizable force and a set of deadly inverted conflagration wards would result in a massacre, and not the kind the Dark Tosser liked. If wishes were fishes . . .
Unfortunately Harry did not have access to a squad or ten of Aurors which was about right for the numbers he'd need. Still, if he could sneak within range of a thrown dagger this could all be over shortly. So, invisibility cloak in place, he set about doing just that.
XXXXX
Alger Flint hadn't had many opportunities in the world that he had been born into.
As the eldest son of the well-known and generally respected house of Flint that shouldn't have been the case. Though far from the heights of Pureblood respect and deference the Houses of Malfoy or Zabini could claim, he should still have been able to claim a slot in the Ministry- maybe even worked his way up to an assistant department head - especially after graduating from Hogwarts as a three-year Prefect in Slytherin.
Instead, he'd gone to Knockturn Alley the night of his graduation to get drunk with his friends, gotten into a bar fight, and ended up bitten by a werewolf when he'd semi-drunkenly hexed the man in the back while trying to hit one of the men his carousing had irritated.
Since then he'd been ostracized by men who had once been his friends and shunned by women who had once thought to improve their station by marrying into a house that could trace its pure blood back twelve generations.
So when the Dark Lord had appeared personally in the dive where he'd been busy trying to drink himself into unconsciousness and promised him and others like him a place in the new world he was going to create from the ashes of Wizarding Britain, he'd jumped at the opportunity.
Now, however, with six or seven of his Lord's band reduced to smoldering corpses in bare moments he was far less comfortable with his choice. Unfortunately, the mark on his arm had sealed his decision too thoroughly for him to change his mind.
For a moment he closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm his nerves.
And smelled something that reeked of snake and magic and human. Behind them.
"My Lord! Ambush!" he yelled as he turned and cast a blasting curse where he could smell the target.
Yet even with such limited warning of the attack, the other wizard was able to avoid the spell. Unfortunately for him, however, the dirt kicked up by the curse fouled his invisibility cloak. Alger immediately began to follow up with a killing curse, "Avada k-"
He never had the opportunity to complete it. The last thing to pass through Alger Flint's mind was the goblin-forged throwing blade that entered through his left eye socket.
XXXXX
Harry did not waste time cursing. Even though the presumed werewolf had cost him the opportunity to assassinate Tommy-boy, he was still in perfect position to bleed his forces dry. Even as he threw and then banished his first knife to take out the most immediate threat to himself, he was already casting banishing charms on anyone within a meter or two of the cottage in front of him.
Why waste time with more elaborate spells that drained more energy when he could let the wards do the hard work for him?
XXXXX
When the outer layer of wards had fallen, the Potters had not panicked. This possible eventuality had been the entire reason that they'd purchased the exorbitantly expensive goblin wards in the first place, and panicking would make that entire expenditure worthless. "Lily, they're coming! Grab Harry and go!" James yelled as he sprinted for the window to the right of the cottage's front door. A quick peek made him pale even further than he had already. The street outside the low wall seemed absolutely packed with Death Eaters. At least seven or eight more were spread out in the yard and advancing towards the house were a half dozen more with the Traitor and his master in tow.
Having confirmed his wife's worst suspicions, James slapped his hand down on the runic array hidden beside the window that brought the goblin wards to the level Sirius would probably have described as 'More paranoid than Moody' if his brother in all but blood had known of them. He was all set to activate his emergency portkey when he heard his wife curse viciously upstairs.
"They must have brought in wardstones! Aparition and portkeys are both blocked!" she yelled as little Harry started to cry loudly. Probably in protest from back-to-back failed evacuation attempts. James's blood ran cold as he considered just how much effort had gone into this ambush. More than five thousand galleons worth of wardstones to prevent escape. Not to mention bribing or putting someone inside the Floo Office under the Imperious. If he's gone to this level to kill us, there's no way we'll escape on foot.
A flick of his wand and a quick incantation summoned his Patronus. "Go to Sirius, tell him to get Dumbledore and anyone else he can scrape up. The bastard's here; Peter sold us out. Maybe the wards will hold long enough," he said, then watched the messenger fly off, though in his heart he couldn't quite believe it. Quickly he transfigured several pieces of furniture into cover for when the Death Eaters inevitably broke in. He looked back out the window just in time for Voldemort to finish his scans, a contemptuous look on his face, and motion his people forward.
Suppose it was too much to hope that he'd stumble into the wards himself. James reflected as the unfortunate Death Eaters moved up to the house, crossed the carefully hidden second line wards, and all immediately went up in pillars of flame nearly as hot as a dragon's breath. One, he noticed, had the presence of mind to try to cast a flame freezing charm. The Living Flame spell reacted poorly to the attempt. If anything it burned hotter. James was briefly glad the air in the house was magically purified. The burnt pork smell of seared human remains after the raid on the Parsons had made him nauseous for a week.
Knowing not to give up any advantage in the situation he was stuck in, James pressed another runic cluster, this one on the windowsill, that opened a small seam in the wards. Immediately, he opened fire on Voldemort and Pettigrew. There wasn't much chance of killing either of them, but if he could distract the so called 'Dark Lord' by forcing him to block spells, then he wasn't going to be able to focus his full attention on the wards.
Sure enough, both of the dark wizards threw up shields in time enough to stop his barrage of spells and Voldemort almost casually decapitated the rock-turned-lion James had transfigured behind him with a cutting curse before throwing up another shield to block a spell from Lily that James tentatively identified as a borderline dark Arabic piercing curse that was immediately followed with a Byzantine curse designed to penetrate shields.
The Dark Asshat slapped it aside almost easily before being forced to block another volley from James. Then, as if Heaven had answered his prayers, he heard one of the Death Eaters yell, "My lord! Ambush!" God bless Sirius Black! James had no idea how the man had gotten the Order there so quickly, but he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the murdering bastards go down almost immediately. Seconds later, five of the Death eaters inside the yard were banished into the conflagration wards in quick succession before they got wise and started to take cover behind the low wall. James shifted his fire off of Voldemort long enough to put a Reducto into the nearest one's back while Lily picked off the two on her side.
Unfortunately, that was all the time Voldemort needed. A bare two flicks of his wand reduced the wards to half strength and another, moments later, shattered them entirely. James abandoned the window to dive behind cover deeper in the room moments before the glass was banished right into where his face had just been. James reached into his pocket for the potion package Lily had prepared, 'just in case' and quickly drank a Pepper Up to boost his flagging reserves just as Lily appeared on the stairs and transfigured them into better cover.
Their eyes met across the room, and James couldn't help but smile. Maybe, just maybe they might be able to get out of this mess alive after all. He must have spent a lot of his reserves pulling down the wards with brute force that way. If we can just hold him off until the Order can fight their way inside-
A quick roll and a shield were all that saved him as Voldemort came through the door and immediately fired a dark blasting curse at his cover. Lily immediately fired at the Dark Lord and Wormtail while James transfigured the debris into spears and banished them at the doorway. Just survive until the Order can fight their way in. Somehow, he doubted that was going to be as easy as it sounded.
XXXXX
Harry cursed as the second line of wards fell, then cursed again and ducked a bolt of magic the color of his eyes before snapping off a silent cutting curse that opened a Death Eater's throat almost to his spine. What the Americans called a 'functional decapitation' since it was severing everything important. A quick glance at the front of the cottage revealed a lack of visible Dark Wankers and an explosion inside. Harry banished his last dagger into the chest of another silver-masked wizard and ducked back into cover and cursed. Damn it! I've come this far and I'm going to lose them anyway?
No. He refused to let that happen. He had to get in there and kill Voldemort and he had to do it right the bloody hell now. That meant he couldn't waste time with these pillocks. I'd give my left nut for my potions to have survived intact. Unproductive, the thought was shunted aside. He was beginning to consider a frontal assault in spite of its low chance of working when an object on the street caught his eye.
A car was parked in front of the house a bit down the road and it dredged up a memory. One of Hermione's spells that, in that understated way of hers, she'd described as 'car to cat transfiguration.' He'd never cast it himself. Combat transfiguration was not one of his skills, and it was an expensive spell to cast even for a mature witch.
But he'd always done well under pressure. His pa. . . . Lily and James's lives rested on his presence. Perhaps even his analog's life. Calming himself as much as possible he spent a valuable second making sure he had the image of what his . . . of what Hermione had created clear in his mind as he closed his eyes and forced magic to work his will. Almost immediately he regretted it; the pain as he pushed his young body's limits was excruciating. Still, when he forced his eyes open, he saw exactly what he'd remembered.
The vaguely patherlike cat formed of steel and razor sharp glass roared its anger and pounced on the suddenly very busy Death Eaters. By the time Harry forced himself to his feet the feline abomination had slaughtered three of them and was working on a fourth. Given that there had only been six or seven left, Harry was confident that the transfigured and animated pseudo-golem could handle them. Another explosion from the cottage got him running in that direction. Only at the last minute did he remember to reach up and press the runes laboriously inscribed onto the armor along the side of his jaw. No sense in letting a good chance to give old Snake Face misinformation go to waste.
XXXXX
Lily couldn't believe that they had lasted this long. Just the two of them against Pe-the Traitor and Voldemort. Only the fact that she and James knew each other and the way the other fought so well had kept them alive this long. Well, that and the fact that the Traitor was almost more a hindrance to Voldemort than a help.
She'd cast a charm almost as soon as the fight started that apparently even the Dark Lord himself didn't know how to counter. It had whipped up a whirlwind of debris in front of her that had successfully intercepted everything from killing curses to explosive hexes, but that she could control well enough to still effectively fire back. Still, Lily knew that Voldemort was mostly treating her as a distraction at the moment. James was more immediately vulnerable than she was and even though he had more room to maneuver, he lacked the height advantage Lily possessed.
He was also, Lily knew, beginning to slow. She couldn't believe Voldemort's endurance. It was simply inhuman how the man could burn through so much magic and still have power to spare. In contrast, her husband's transfigurations were taking longer and becoming less precise.
Where is the Order? she wondered as she bit her lip and fired another brace of curses through suddenly formed gaps in her whirling shield. A severing curse nearly struck Pe-the Traitor, but at the last moment, Voldemort levitated a piece of what had originally been a chair into its path, apparently deciding that having a second target for the Potters to deal with was important enough for him to save his branded rat. Are they having that much trouble with the Death Eaters outside? Taking a page from her husband's book of tricks, she transfigured some of the debris behind them into scorpions, but the Traitor must have noticed them out of the corner of his eye because he turned and sprayed acid onto them. Still, the trick was more something James would have pulled than Lily's forte, and the Dark Lord finally made a mistake. The cutting curse that came from James wand caught Voldemort in mid turn towards her own position, his eyes widened and he shifted to the right to dodge.
Voldemort's reflexes were, quie simply, serpentine: fast and fluid. Even so, he wasn't quite fast enough to avoid the whole blow, and a ragged tear opened nearly an inch long on the outside of his left arm.
That was when Voldemort apparently decided that enough was enough. The brace of curses he fired at her husband's position left the dark wizard gasping, but they also brought much of the second story's contents on that half of the house falling on and around her husband's last position.
"James!" she cried in horror, speaking the first word that was not a spell in what felt like an hour. Her distraction was enough to open a hole in her defenses, and the most powerful dark wizard to strike England in centuries snuck a curse through. The wall beside her exploded. Something struck the side of her head, and the world grayed out.
XXXXX
Harry stepped into the house just in time to see hi-Lily struck by the debris of some type of explosive curse, and everything went red as Harry's rage boiled over. Peripherally, he noted that Voldemort, that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned INBRED FILTH throwing his head back in a laugh as HIS MOTHER lay bleeding and perhaps DIEING on the stairs.
Scraping up the dregs of his magic, he threw a silent piercing curse at the bastard's back. Something must have warned him, though Harry had no idea what, because he wandlessly pulled Peter Pettigrew into the curse's path.
"Oh?" The Dark Tosser asked as he turned, but then froze as the lights of the cottage and the pause in the battle finally gave him a clear view of his enemy.
He must have been expecting the Order of the Flaming Chicken. Harry realized as the last of the haze of rage faded a bit from his vision and he remembered the plan. If he'd had the energy, he would have sworn at himself for being an imbecile. He was literally running on fumes magically, only his long experience preventing himself from passing out in magical exhaustion.
"Who are you to dare assault the great Lord Voldemort? I might have expected the Old Fool's imbeciles to think they could win against my might, but-"
Harry tuned him out. If the bastard was content to run his mouth, Harry was content to let him. Frankly, he needed a breather. Alright, I've got him right where I want him. Now what the hell do I do? He was going to have to play at least one of his trump cards. The question, though, was which one. Damn it, if I had any magic left at all I could take him. he's wounded and he used a lot of power pulling down the wards. Even without his gauntlets, his innate sensing ability was sufficient to tell that Snake Face currently had less power than Draco had in second year, and Harry could have pounded him into the ground any day of the week. If wishes were . . . Harry's thought trailed off and he set to contemplating furiously. I still have the runes. When he'd inspected his new younger self, they had still been present, but they'd been black. Inactive. Finally the pieces of the puzzle clicked together. Now Luna's notes make sense. 'Time travel is impossible' despite having the ritual all worked out in the following pages. It had made no sense to him at the time. Now it did. I didn't travel in time. If I had, the runes would be gone since I haven't earned the right to them. I didn't travel back in time. I traveled sideways. That's what the ritual was for. Jumping timelines to one that had not yet arrived at the point you wished to change.
It explained why he'd missed the date he had set. There wasn't a timeline at that exact place. It dropped me as close as it could to when I'd specified. Which meant . . . I have the runes. I've earned the runes.
Harry snapped back to focus the moment Voldemort pointed his wand at him. "How many did you lose simply facing my servants? You stand no chance against me!" The man, if he could still be called that stated, doing his best to cover for his weakness.
Harry smiled beneath the masklike covering across his mouth and spoke, "How many," he began, his voice that of an old man, gravel like and low in pitch before it shifted to a middle aged woman's voice with a soft alto, "did we lose?" Voldemort jerked minutely, surprised, before his eyes narrowed as the runes on Harry's collar again changed his voice, this time to that of a little girl who sounded remarkably like Luna Lovegood had at twelve, "There was only ever," he said before his voice became a man's tenor, "one of us here," He concluded as he silently pushed what magic he had left into the runic tattoos on his shoulders and chest, suddenly confident, knowing what Voldemort was going to ask, and knowing that it would activate the Geas.
"Who are you!" the last heir of Slytherin's blood demanded.
Under his mask, Harry's smile grew, and as he spoke, were anyone able to see them, they would find his runes began to glow a deep green. "We are an," he began in a woman's voice that possessed a slight lisp, then transitioned into an angry sounding man's, "envoy of," before concluding with the voice of a teenaged girl with a slight French accent, "your mortality."
Immediately, Harry felt reenergized as magic began to flood his system as he declared his oath and the Geas written in his flesh activated.
Voldemort was stock still for a moment, "What?" he hissed almost sibilantly, his tone low and almost shocked.
"Did you not / know? You have / overreached yourself. You have / brought damnation upon / your own head," Harry replied, his voice altering every few words. He had the bastard's attention now. Time to feed him as much bullshit as he could shove down his paranoid serpentine throat. "The Count has / been distorted, and / Azrael will brook no / further interference."
There, suitably oblique and cryptic, Harry decides before speaking again, "Now, die!"
Voldemort's shock holds him motionless for a moment. Harry can almost imagine him trying to process the fact that this strange being is totally unafraid and apparently contemptuous of him, and failing. Just for a moment, he looked like a poleaxed steer before rage passed over his face and he yelled, "Avada Kedavra!"
Harry had already expected the attack. It had been half the point of pushing him so hard and demonstrating such contempt. An enraged Voldemort was a predictable one and silently summoned a piece of debris to take the hit instead of him. "Do not think to / strike us down / with our Master's power," he said, again force feeding Snake Face a load of bull before he began to stride forward, the wand in his hand snapping off silent but pinpoint accurate piercing and severing curses, keeping in mind the fragile state of the cottage and avoiding things that would explode. Voldemort, for the first time in all the times they fought, actually began to back away. All too easy to play on a man's insecurities when you know exactly which buttons to push.
Harry was feeling confident. He had Tommy-boy on his heels, and was casting quickly enough that he was forcing Snake Face to use up more and more of his remaining pool of strength blocking instead of fighting back.
That was, of course, when everything went to hell.
XXXXX
James Potter came to face down with an annoying weight on top of him, a fuzzy head, and broken glasses. Reflexively, he cast a Reparo at them before his concussed brain reengaged and his eyes widened. Lily! Harry!
He tried to jump to his feet, only to be forcibly reminded of the weigh on top of him as it shifted and jammed into his right kidney. Twisting his head to look backwards, he noted that the bedroom set from his and Lily's room was stacked on and around him and could only be grateful that nothing truly heavy had landed on him directly. The chair leg poking him in the back was bad enough. Quickly, he transfigured the armoire holding it down into paperboard, then quickly pushed the chair off of him, noting peripherally, and despite a concussion that really ought to have had him passed out for several hours, that there were still spells being cast, which meant that there was still a chance to save Harry and Lily.
Shaking his head in an attempt to clear it, he stood up right into a killing curse.
XXXXX
Unlike her husband, Lily had been struck only a glancing blow by a piece of a wall stud. Enough to ring her bell, but not quite knock her out or give her a depressed skull fracture like the blow James Potter had taken only moments before her. She came back to near-clarity more rapidly, and peeked past the side of her transfigured wall to see Voldemort fighting a shortish man she didn't recognize clad in robes from head to toe. She scrambled around for her wand and was just raising herself up to curse the bastard who'd practically destroyed her family home in the back, when he seemed to go absolutely berserk.
"Avada Kedavra! Avada Kedavra! Avada Kedavra!" he yelled with what sounded suspiciously like terror. It looked, initially, like he had only needed the first curse. The Dark Lord's sudden apparently terror-induced assault obviously surprised the man he was fighting and the first curse struck him in the chest.
But instead of the man falling limply to the floor in death, his chest seemed to explode and scatter fragments of stone all around him. The second curse struck one of those fragments and detonated prematurely. The third would likely have gone the same way as the second except that the man had gotten off one last curse as he was hit, and the cutting curse cut an inch long slice out of the outside of Voldemort's wand arm midway between his elbow and wrist, and the wand spun out of his hand as he fired, the death curse flying wildly off target. And straight into a just-standing James Potter who dropped like a puppet with cut strings.
Lily's eyes widened and her jaw dropped as she stared in shocked incomprehension at what she'd just seen. A few moments later she heard a voice screaming her husband's name. It was only when the tears began to drip onto her hands that she realized the voice was hers.
XXXXX
For a moment, no one in the room moved. Harry knew, intellectually, that he was probably going into shock. Though his armor had saved him from the curse, the concussion had still caused at least some damage to his ribs. Oh, and he'd just watched the cross-timeline analog of his father murdered. When that thought finally processed, his hands clenched hard enough that the bones in his fingers popped. Harry's mind took in the room in a fraction of a moment.
His mother was still crying out his father's name, and Voldemort had already begun to turn to her. Harry began to raise his right hand, only to realize his wand wasn't in it. Instead, he reached for the red and white containment sphere on his belt, unclipped it, and threw it towards his mother over Voldemort's head. It was a perfect throw. It struck the barricade in front of the newly widowed Lily Potter and snapped open as the containment system disengaged. A semi-formless cloud of black vapor took shape just in time to intercept the killing curse that would have orphaned a one year old, and orphaned his analog for the second time. It also made the vaporous being annoyed.
Harry managed to drag himself to a sitting position and commanded, "Go get him / Mort," as he wandlessly summoned both his wand and the containment sphere.
The Black cloud let out a roar that sounded like the wails of a thousand damned souls all crying out at once and swirled forward. Voldemort screamed as it surrounded him, closed off the breath from his lungs, and began to feed. Harry caught motion in his peripheral vision and turned his head away from the disturbing scene to see his mo-Lily gathering her husband into her arms.
"James?" she asked as though expecting him to wake. "James?" she asked again, a little louder, her voice rising in pitch momentarily before falling again, and Harry closed his eyes in an effort to force back his tears. "Don't leave me, James. Please don't leave me alone." The horrible grief in her voice was more than he could bear. He forced himself to his feet as Lily began to sob inconsolably into her husband's hair. He hobbled over to her as quickly as he could on unsteady legs, letting the magic restored by his Geas push him away from shock.
Harry stared, hands clenched, and silently cursed whatever higher beings existed, and when he ran out of those, he cursed himself. I had him. I had him. And instead of killing him and being done with it, I played fucking tiddlywinks with him.
He'd come back in time. Or rather, left his own with two goals. Destroy Voldemort, and save two people. Merlin and Morgana, I can't even do that right! He worked his jaw and mastered himself before he knelt down and put his hand on his m-on Lily's shoulder. She looked up, but hardly seemed to react to the stranger in her home.
He'd intended to give her his condolences, seal the cloud of mist still feeding on Voldemort's death, send a messenger patronus to St. Mungo's and leave before he ruined anything else. Instead, looking into her eyes, his conviction shattered. Looking in her eyes, he could not force himself to see simply Lily Potter, a stranger, a cross-time dimensional analog of a person he'd never known. His mother was grieving his father's death; he couldn't leave her alone. "He didn't leave / you alone," he said before grimacing under his mask as she flinched at the cycling voiced. He reached up and deactivated the runes before starting over, "He didn't leave you alone, Lily. He gave you a son, with black hair and green eyes," he reminded her.
It was like flipping a switch. Her empty gaze, focused only on what she had lost, vanished. Her eyes widened, "Harry!" she yelled, and took off up the stairs so fast she seemed to have aparated.
Harry, the older Harry, (and wouldn't that be awkward if he stayed?) felt torn. He wanted to follow, even if she never knew, if he took the secret and fled, if he died in an accident tomorrow, she was his mother. The very image of the woman he'd seen in the Mirror of Erised a decade and a half ago. And a part of him wanted nothing more than to seek comfort from her. To have a chance to have at least a semblance of the family fate had denied him twice over. Thrice he corrected himself, looking down at the cooling body of his father. He knelt and slid his eyes closed.
He closed his own moments later. Merlin what a mess.
He got his feet back under him and began to stand, favoring his injured ribs when a voice called out from the shattered doorway, "Reducto!"
He had no time to shield even if that had been his first reaction, but he'd been surprised before. Still, without his gauntlets, his defensive options were limited to those with a wand, but, as his mind caught up with his reflexes, he decided this was probably the best of several bad options anyway. The Reductor, instead of hitting him in the back and potentially doing further damage to his ribs or the organs those ribs protected, instead impacted his left wrist and detonated on his armor. Thankfully, the first layer of the armor held, basilisk hide sheading the magic contemptuously, and the concussion wasn't quite enough to break any bones. Harry whirled, wand out and mentally cursing himself for a fool for assuming his transfigured cat had killed all of the Death Eaters outside.
Only to stop in shock when he saw who was standing in the doorway preparing another curse. "Padfoot!" he barked out, which caused the much healthier looking version of his Dogfather to pause. Then the man took in the lack of a silver mask and the hole blasted in the chest of his armor and his jaw dropped.
"What the bloody hell?"
"Sirius?" Li-no, if there is any chance she can accept me, until I know she won't I will call her mother- called out from upstairs. He could hear her moving but nothing from his mini-me, she must have silenced him to keep him quiet during the fight.
Sirius's eyes darted from Harry to the stairs and back. "Lily, what's going on?" he demanded, wand still pointed at what, to him, was a total unknown that he'd found crouched over his best friend's body.
Thankfully, before he could do anything drastic, Lily appeared at the top of the stairs holding baby Harry to her chest as though he was made of china. "Oh, Sirius!"she cried as she rushed down the stairs and enveloped him in a hug that quickly became wracking sobs.
"Lily? Who is this? What happened?" he asked, shocked before he seemed to finally notice the cloud hovering over Voldemort's corpse. "And what the hell is that?"
That, at least, was a question Harry could answer. It was also likely to distract the others and so might start the process of sorting everything out. "That," he said, "is a Mortivore."
Sirius shot him another suspicious look. "And that means?" he inquired.
"The Latin is plain. And quite descriptive," he said with only a touch of sarcasm. Sirius visibly began to try to parse the word out. Instead it was his mother who jumped on the answer.
"A death eater?" she asked incredulously.
"Indeed," Harry affirmed, "They're a very rare variety of wraith that only develops in places where there have been . . . tens of thousands of deaths in a short period of time. Even then, they are not usually very strong. This one was captured from the remains of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. It was literally born of the deaths of more than a million people, and it gorged on the energy given off by those deaths. It is quite strong," he said as he finally tossed the containment sphere at the Mortivore. The specifically attuned runes reengaged and sealed it away. Leaving what had been an obscured corpse revealed.
Sirius took one look and his eyes widened nearly to the point of popping out of his head, "Merlin! Is that?"
"Tom Riddle, the so-called Dark Lord," Harry said as he reattached the Mortivore's containment sphere to his belt. Old Snake Face was clearly recognizable, though that was already beginning to change. As they watched, cracks began to spread over Voldemort's visible skin. Harry knew that given a few more minutes the corpse would simply collapse into dust. It was, after all, a hallmark of necromancy use, and was likely Dumbledore's first clue that Tommy-boy had made at least one Horcrux.
"That? You?" Sirius stumbled over his tongue, obviously shocked at seeing the corpse. "Who are you?" he demanded, finally seeming to settle on one question.
He reached for his hood, hesitated, and then decided to push on. Better to get the shocks over with quickly rather than drag them out until the rest of the Order arrived. Harry lowered the hood of his robes and pulled down the mask, eyes lowered and heart nearly beating out of his chest.
"James?" Sirius blurted in surprise, but it was Lily that Harry focused on when she spoke a fraction of a second later.
"Harry?" she asked, eyes the same brilliant green as his wide open and staring at him. She quickly glanced down at the one-year-old in her arms before looking back up and meeting his gaze, looking, if anything, even more shocked than before. "But, how?"
"A ritual. Time travel, or that's what I thought at the time," he explained as Sirius stumbled back to the wall and promptly dropped to sit on the floor, jaw still dropped. "It was actually dimensional travel, and I somehow lost a decade and a half or so in the bargain," he said with a wry smile before even that expression fell off his face. "I'm sorry. About Dad, that is. Even with all this I couldn't save him," he admitted, shoulders hunched, expecting a rebuke.
His mother pulling him into a hug almost knocked him over. "Hush, it's all right," she said as she brushed tears he hadn't realized he was shedding off of his face while ignoring the ones on her cheeks, "none of us would have made it if you hadn't been here. That bastard," she indicated Voldemort's crumbling corpse, "brought enough of his servants to be sure of that."
For a minute, Harry stood and simply let himself be comforted before his younger self began to get fussy, and he stepped back out of the embrace. He sniffed, dried his eyes, and took a deep breath before trying to kick his mind into gear. "The Order will be here soon," he said, thinking out loud.
"Yeah," Sirius confirmed. "Though I don't think they'll believe this. I wouldn't have if I hadn't se-" he managed before Harry cut him off.
"We can't tell them," he stated firmly; when he saw Sirius start to open his mouth he continued forcefully, "Dumbledore does not have the Potters' best interests at heart. I speak from experience." That shut his godfather up and made Lily's eyes open wide.
"I'd nearly forgotten. When we first discussed setting up the Fidelius, Albus cautioned us against using Sirius as secret keeper. Said he was too obvious a choice." Her voice faltered and she paled enough that Harry was momentarily concerned she was going to faint.
Harry took over, "That was probably about the time people began to mutter about Remus being a dark creature, right?" Sirius stared and his jaw fell open. "That left one choice, correct? It seemed so obvious that the rat should be secret keeper. After all, no one would suspect him." Harry shook his head. "All Dumbledore cared about was discovering which of two possibilities would be his child of prophecy."
Lily gasped and clutched baby Harry tighter. "You mean?"
Harry nodded, "He set a trap. Or rather two traps. He was perfectly willing to sacrifice all of you to determine whether or not Harry or Neville was the child mentioned in the prophecy. Dumbledore is every bit the dark lord Voldemort is. Worse even, because instead of torture and murder, he cloaks his actions in manipulation and soft tyranny." Harry frowned and then moved for the door as a plan came to mind. "And I need a new name. And a fake history if I'm going to serve as a distraction to keep the old meddler away from Mini-me."
"One of my cousins?" Lily started hesitantly. "Not many people in the Wizarding World know enough about the Muggles to prove that I don't have any."
Sirius shot that down immediately. "No, even without glasses he looks too much like James. . . " he trailed off for a moment, obviously considering an idea before wincing.
"What is it?" Lily asked as they all filed outside.
"You won't like it," Sirius said before Lily's glare got him talking. "Charlus wasn't all that old when he passed. Not for a Wizard of his power anyway. Not too old to have sired a bastard."
Lily grimaced as Harry looked around and then whistled sharply. "You're right I do- oh my," she cut herself off as the cat, looking somewhat the worse for wear, jumped down from the roof of the house next door.
Harry made eye contact with it and then it immediately began seeking out the corpses of the death eaters in the street and yard and tearing them apart while Harry summoned his throwing knives from the corpses. "Tell anyone who asks that Da-James created it. Family magic, you don't know the spell." Harry instructed. "And call me Hadrian. Any slips will seem funny rather than suspicious."
The two adults nodded before Sirius got back to brainstorming as they headed back inside, "So, Hadrian Potter, bastard son of Charlus Potter and a Muggle-"
"Muggle won't work," Lily cut him off, "He has a wand and knows how to use it, but he won't show up in any records here . . . an American witch?" she suggested.
"With his accent?" Sirius shot back.
"Naturalized. Lived here in the muggle world instead of back in America. Home schooled because the British Education system is sub-par. Her name . . . Anna, she died recently of cancer," Harry suggested.
Lily and Sirius both stopped and stared at him before demanding, "Sub-par?" in unison.
Harry began stripping out of his armor as he responded, "Britain's history curriculum is a joke. Outside Europe, no one else in the world recognizes OWLs or NEWTs in the subject, and Muggle Studies is an insult. Even transfiguration is behind the times. They still teach Gamp's law for God's sake which was disproved in the '60s. Of course it was a muggleborn who did it, so I suppose that explains why the Ministry here ignores it. Don't even get me started on Potions." Harry said with an eye roll. The class had been so much easier when he studied it during his time training in Japan. Adding the muggle chemistry lessons to the magical curriculum fills so many holes in the information we learned from Snape.
Finally rid of his armor, wincing at the damage to his ribs, he transfigured his clothing to worn, if good quality muggle apparel. He then shrunk his armor and slipped it into a pocket "Two more questions, how did I find the cottage here since it was under the Fidelius?" he asked, his mother and Sirius still staring at his revelation about education in England, "and how did I manage to defeat Voldemort?"
Lily shook herself after another moment and turned her formidable intellect to finding an answer, "Well, the cottage here has been in the family for years. Let's say your 'mother' knew of it and sent you here with an address. You wandered past earlier but couldn't find it, then came back after the wards fell and stumbled inside trying to help," she fabricated quickly. "As for the Dark Lord . . ." she visibly struggled for a moment then shrugged. "Accidental magic. A reaction to seeing your 'half-brother'" here she choked up a bit before soldiering on, "killed right in front of you as you came in the door." She shook herself and clenched her fists for a moment before transfiguring a piece of debris into a cradle for Harry. "And don't think I didn't notice you favoring your ribs. Off with your shirt, young man, and let me take a look at them."
XXXXX
So it was, when the Order of the Phoenix arrived nearly ten minutes later, they found Lily Potter bandaging an unknown boy's ribs and watching young Harry while Sirius Black was gathering up the wands of the nearly two-dozen deceased. All while a large, and disturbing metallic and glass feline looked on, trying to groom its glass 'fur' to get all the pieces of death eater out.
XXXXX
Wow, this has been sitting on my computer half-finished and largely untouched for most of two years. For whatever reason, I suddenly felt the desire to finish it. That likely has something to do with the fact that I'm well and truly sick of beating my head against the wall with SotBP. I'll write some more on this until I hit a roadblock or I regain the will to work more on the Thirty Xanatos Pileup for my other fic.
Please review! It is, after all, the coin of the realm.