From a Distance
There was absolutely no indication anything unusual would happen. Far back in a perfectly unremarkable orchard, it was a perfectly normal autumn night. Deep and chill, darkness broken only by the faint glow of towns in the distance, pinpricks of starlight peeking through the nearly overcast sky. Barren hazelnut trees quivered in the light breeze, the occasional sound of twigs rustling together, wood softly groaning. But otherwise, silent, still, calm.
But then, Fate rarely ever gives any warning before pulling Her usual nonsense.
There was no crescendo, no subtle building of power. One second, nothing; the next, everything. White light exploded into existence with a high shriek, the agonised keening reality could not withhold at the rent torn into it. Bolts of silver lightning, tendrils of unforgiving power, one then another and another, broke off from the vortex, blindly grasping at grass, at trunk, at branch, a dozen trees bursting into flame all at once. In the center of the violence, a dark shape gradually emerged, an indistinct form silhouetted against the impossible glare. In the storm of light and noise, the form grew larger, and larger.
The vortex abruptly vanished, leaving behind scorched earth and burning tree, a nude, pale-skinned woman collapsed trembling in the center.
Once her lungs started working again, Elizabeth Potter screamed.
She'd known it would hurt. It was well-established that, in any sort of event like this, a sort of disharmonic interference set in proportional to the degree of displacement. In the rare spontaneous event, reality bending without conscious guidance, it was evidently even worse — very few people have ever survived such an experience. When the displacement is engineered intentionally, the designer of the ritual can, to some degree, anticipate potential sources of interference and make adjustments, smoothen out the waveform. But not completely. This sort of magic simply wasn't understood well enough to ever account for everything. So, she'd known it would hurt.
But bloody buggering fuck, she hadn't expected just how much. It was as fiendfyre transmuted into lightning, sparking up and down her nerves, consuming every bit of her from the inside out. The denser the nerve endings, the worse it got — which in a few places was not a fun thing to experience. After only seconds, her vision nothing but red and white spots unchanged no matter whether her eyes were open or closed, her body convulsing outside of her control, the faint taste of blood already rising from the tearing in her throat, she could do absolutely nothing but internally beg for it to stop. It didn't even matter exactly how.
Much as the white had swept her up and dropped her, coming and going in an instant flash, the pain was abruptly gone. Which, in an absurd sort of way, was quite possibly the best thing she had ever felt. The second after the agony lifted, an odd sense of euphoria shot across her, making her feel almost giddy. No almost about it, actually — she couldn't help a few breathless, girlish giggles, gasping for breath in the powdery dirt.
After a few minutes, or perhaps hours for all she could tell, Ellie gradually gained control of herself. She weakly pushed herself up to unsteady feet, took a moment to gaze blearily around. A shallow crater gouged into the earth, coated in two inches of ash and tiny slivers of glass, the grass for metres around blackened and curling, the nearest trees broken and shattered, a few further away still burning bright in the night. Huh. She couldn't help feeling glad, in a somewhat tired, absent sort of way, that Hermione had convinced her to use as an anchor this particular confluence in ambient magic, deep in the middle of one of County Kent's many hazelnut orchards. If she'd been anywhere near somewhere populated, this could have killed a fair number of people.
But she didn't have time to let her thoughts wander right now. She was in the middle of nowhere, sure, but that was a serious magical disturbance she'd just rode her way in on. There was absolutely no doubt the Department of Mysteries would come to investigate. With the war going on, she rather expected they would be a bit busy — it might take them some time to get here, but they would certainly come. They would ask her questions she couldn't answer. And she was exhausted, her wand out of reach, and, to top it all off, quite naked at the moment. No, would not be waiting around.
Her steps heavy and uneven, she slowly walked up out of the crater, started stumbling her way down between two rows of trees. Once she was a short distance away from where she'd arrived, she pulled at her magic, drawing it up and into her throat. It took her far too many attempts, her hold on her magic almost too clumsy to manage even that — good thing she didn't have to rely on wandless magic to retrieve her things. Still unsteadily walking along, she hissed under her breath, pleading for help, her magic amplifying the Parseltongue call, sending the command far further than it would travel on its own.
For minutes she walked, hissing the same short phrase over and over, fighting the increasing urge to sit down and rest.
Finally, after what felt like forever, she heard a light rustling off to her left. She stopped, turned her head just in time to catch a dark shape moving through the grass. It took a moment for her to gather enough details to pick out what it was: a common adder, maybe a foot and a half long, a rare solid black. She wasn't sure if she should find that funny or not. Not important. She hissed down at the thing, ordering it to go to the nearest human dwelling, steal a knife for her somehow — if not a knife, something equally sharp of similar size — and come back with it. Again, she forced more power into the command than simple Parseltongue. The sapience snakes seemed to have speaking to her was nothing but an illusion, a temporary construct Parselmouths instinctively created in those they spoke with; without the extra power, the simulated consciousness would break down long before the little thing could carry out her orders.
Once it had slithered away, Ellie plodded over to the nearest tree, slumped to sit with her back propped against it. Taking long, calming breaths, she prodded at her thigh, planning out where she'd make her incision.
It had taken the work of all four of them to recreate the ritual only alluded to in documents burgled from...honestly she didn't remember where, one of the many places they'd targeted. Anyway, after a few months of intermittent work, they had managed to finish it. And successfully, too — here she was, alive and safely displaced, she could only assume, to the proper point in the past. But despite all their work, there was one problem they'd discovered early on in development they'd never managed to solve: the ritual would displace her, but only her. Anything she carried, anything she wore, all of it would be left behind. Hence the naked part. There'd been one small trick Luna'd thought of, very clever. Anything that was fully enclosed by her body would be considered part of her body, whether it biologically was or not. The magic of the ritual wasn't that specific.
She'd had Daphne implant her wand along her femur for her. But now she had to get it out herself.
It was not going to be fun.
She was just starting to worry her little helper would never return, and maybe getting a bit cold, when she heard rustling again. And there he was, the thin handle of a short knife held awkwardly between his jaws. Hissing a thank you, with an appreciative stroke along his back, she accepted the knife. Holding it tight in her right hand, she prodded further at the vague shape of her wand under her skin, making sure she'd detected the base correctly, just above her knee. She placed the blade — rather less sharp than she would like, but oh well — against her skin, wincing at the sensation of cold metal against her shivering flesh. A whimper of protest clawed at her throat, but she shoved it down; a tingle of panic sparked in her head, begging her to retreat from the wrongness of what she was about to do, but she ignored that. She'd been injured much worse than this before. Of course, she hadn't done any of that to herself, but still, this wasn't that big of a deal. She had to stop being so very silly. Right now.
With as much force as she could muster, she pushed the knife into her skin, and shoved the blade down her leg, cutting a deep furrow from the tip of her wand, stretching an inch or two down toward her knee.
The pain was instant and distracting, lines of throbbing fire that seemed to extend beyond where she knew the wound ended, splintering through flesh and bone from her ankle to her hip. The knife fell to the ground as she clutched at her leg with shaking fingers, choking back a scream well enough it came out as little more than a gasping moan. Blood quickly welled up between her fingers, the feel of it running down the sides and back of her leg and slipping in narrow streams up the underside of her thigh was almost more ticklish than anything. Ignoring the flaring agony with each touch, the rising nausea in her throat, she poked into the gash with the fingers of her right hand, pushing past layers of skin and flesh, probing, searching for—
There! She pushed and pulled at the little disk with a finger, wincing as the rotation pinched at her wounded nerves. She got the disc between thumb and finger, started drawing the little thing out of her. It was slippery with her blood, making the process far more difficult than it had to be, but she eventually got it out, the thin wire at one end still stretching into her. Gritting her teeth, she wrapped her hand tight around the disc, and yanked straight out from herself.
She gasped, shuddered at the indescribably uncomfortable feeling of her wand moving beneath her skin, but the experience was thankfully short-lived, the length of wood exiting the hole above her knee with a popping, slurping noise she prayed she'd never have to hear again. Dangling from the wire connected to the disc, she grabbed at her wand, the rush of comforting warmth and tingling power immediately bringing a pained smile to her face. A couple waves had the damage to her thigh healed, the blood on her leg vanished. She twisted the blade of the knife twice along the wire, snapped it off her wand with a jerk of her wrist. A conjured cloth to wipe the blood from the wand itself, a left-handed vanishing to take care of the rest of the blood on her fingers. And it was done.
She leaned back against the tree, the bark pinching at her bare skin, tipped her head back to thunk against the wood. And let out a heavy sigh. That had been fun. Her eyes drifted closed, exhaustion pulling her seductively downward.
She really should get up. She couldn't just sleep here. If nothing else, she'd get really cold. But Morgen, she was so tired...
Reddish light splashed against her eyelids, soft booms and sizzles coming a bit muffled, arrived from some distance. She forced her eyes open, leaned a bit forward, looked around for the source of the noise. After a moment, she found it: fireworks. Magical fireworks, in fact — she was some distance away, but she figured the display of red, yellow, and white shooting stars on the horizon would be quite impressive at a...nearer...
Okay, this was weird. There was something familiar about this. She couldn't quite place it. It was... It was something about shooting stars and Kent. Come on, come on, what was it? She couldn't think of it clearly, the memory too indistinct. A couple of the older Order members, she thought, after Tom's resurrection but before the war really picked up. For some reason, she was remembering a...purple top hat? What was that supposed to mean? Shooting stars...Kent...Order...purple top hat...shooting stars...Kent...Order...
Ah, yes, Daedalus Diggle, that was it. He always did seem to wear that same damn hat. It was a nice hat, she guessed, but some variety wouldn't kill him. Anyway, she remembered now, he'd been fined a considerable number of galleons once upon a time, something about nearly breaking the Statute of Secrecy by firing off a bunch of magical fireworks too near muggle settlements. Diggle always had been a very excitable little guy, and she guessed it had just been too much for his self-control when he'd found out—
A sharp block of ice abruptly fell into Ellie's stomach, a frisson of horror sparking across her skin. Before she even really noticed what was happening, she jumped up to her feet, staring wide-eyed at the lights in the sky. Diggle had lit those fireworks for...in celebration of the fall of Voldemort. But...that couldn't be!
No.
No, no, no.
Oh, fuck no.
From a great deal closer, in the direction of her arrival point, successive pops of apparation split the night. Without thinking, Ellie twisted into the inbetween, cold bands of steel squeezing at her from each side, before the world suddenly appeared again around her. She glanced around her, making sure no one was around, but she was deep in the Forest of Dean, and she didn't see anybody. She conjured herself some robes, quickly dressed. Then she apparated, again and again and again and again. A few metres back and forth, a couple times further away into the forest before popping right back. She threw in a couple longer-distance trips, all to places in the middle of nowhere. Then she popped in not far from Hogsmeade once, giving them the lead they'd follow if they got that far. Then she shadow-walked straight into Diagon Alley, appearing in the middle of the apparation point a few steps away from the front doors of Gringotts.
And was immediately distracted by the babbling roar of voices around her. She looked around the Alley, mouth dropping in disbelief. She'd never seen the Alley like this before. The entire space was packed with dozens, hundreds of people. Chatting, cheering, laughing. Colourful ribbons danced through the air, magical lights sparkling and bouncing from place to place. It was the middle of the goddamn night, and there was a festival going on in Diagon Alley.
No, no, no, no, no!
Her ears pounding at the noise, her teeth grinding so hard her jaw hurt, her fingers clenched tight on her wand, Ellie forced her way into the crowd, pushing on toward the Leaky Cauldron. Revelers jostled her, bumping into her at full force again and again, or simply shoving a hard elbow into her side. Progress was slow, and by the time she was approaching Fortescue's she was already half-deaf, and sore all over from being bumped and prodded. As she passed the tables outside the ice cream parlour, she noticed a messily-folded Daily Prophet, sitting out unattended. She barely spared a glance for the enormous, bolded headline taking up most of the visible page before she snapped it up and continued on.
HE-WHO-MUST-NOT-BE-NAMED DEAD! HIGH ENCHANTER CONFIRMS RUMOURS!
But with only that, Ellie was quivering with helpless fury. No! It was supposed to be September! Why, why, why was it November?
The Leaky Cauldron, when she finally reached it, was just as filled with noisy celebration as the outside. The place was packed, people chattering and laughing, singing songs she couldn't understand over the noise. As she pushed her way to the bar, she heard one group of people shout out a toast to the Potters, and she couldn't help the shiver of hatred running down her spine. She knew the wizarding world back in the seventies and eighties couldn't have been any different than it'd been when she'd been around. She just knew these ingrates hadn't done a thing to stop Tom and his cronies themselves. She just knew they hadn't lifted a finger, hadn't done a single thing to deserve all this celebration. And here they were honouring two of the people who actually had, but not even for the constant, dangerous and thankless work they'd been doing for years — no, just because they'd died! And the beginning of that ridiculous hero-worship they had for her, oh, she knew it was happening even now, people starting to build the myth of the Girl-Who-Lived, who had saved them all from their worthless dithering, at the low, low cost of everyone who loved her. For an extra dose of stupidity, Ellie hadn't even done anything! The whole thing had been her mother! But no, we couldn't actually give a muggleborn credit for something like that, could we? Even one widely known to be an almost absurdly talented prodigy. No, had to be the helpless infant. Somehow.
God, she really did hate magical Britain sometimes.
She'd lost her parents again! God fucking dammit!
It took all she had to stop the incandescent, explosive magic boiling within her from tearing apart the room, perhaps a few of the people in it, so she didn't have enough concentration left to stop her teeth from grinding, her fingers from twitching.
After long, annoying minutes, she finally got Tom's attention, and luckily there was a room available. Also luckily, Tom didn't make any fuss about paying ahead of time, or even proving she had any coin on her — he was either distracted by the celebration, or maybe that was a policy he implemented later, she honestly didn't know. And soon she was alone, in a small, somewhat dilapidated room. Which she hardly paid any attention to. She didn't plan on staying here for long, after all. She dropped the newspaper on the dresser, yanked it apart, spread open to the leading article.
Her fingers tightened further and further on the thin parchment as she read. Dozens of Imperius curses breaking around the country simultaneously, blah blah. Death Eaters confused and disorganised, blah blah. A melted human body identified as You-Know-Who (ergh) found in the Potters' cottage in Godric's Hollow, blah blah. The Lord and Lady James and Lily Evans Potter found dead but, in a crib just before the barely recognisable corpse of the reviled Dark Lord, their—
For a couple seconds, all Ellie could do was stare at the offending word, confusion weakening the assault of her rage and despair.
Their son? Their infant son, Harry Potter. What? Since when... She didn't...
She let out a long sigh. Well, sure, that was a possibility, she guessed. That was one of the peculiarities of long-distance dislocation in time. Hermione had described it as a two-dimensional plane, the x-axis demarcating different points in time, the y-axis different realms, different realities. Short distance hops were accurate — it wasn't hard to stay in your own reality (or stay at the proper time, if you were jumping between realities instead). The further and further out you get on either axis, though, the less accurate you are on the opposite. Going back roughly nineteen years as she had, it was unlikely she'd end up in the exact same reality she'd left from. Similar — it would take a very extreme dislocation to end up in a totally unfamiliar realm — but different.
They had talked about this, mostly as it related to tracking down horcruces, which might not be in quite the places she remembered. Somehow, she hadn't anticipated her other self being a boy as a possibility. Not that it particularly mattered, she guessed. It was just a bit weird.
So. That hadn't gone as planned. She'd intended to come back in September, arrange Pettigrew's death so he couldn't betray her parents, then start working on tracking down Tom's horcruces while making whatever strikes against the Death Eaters she could. It might have been better to go back further, true, but their aim, so to speak, would have been less accurate the further back they tried to throw her, and it would have created increased risk in the ritual itself, possibly even killing her. She was rather lucky as it was — she'd come out in pain, sure, but uninjured. Could have gone much worse.
She couldn't save her parents. That sucked, yes. But, well...
That was why they'd come up with a plan B.
With a sigh, she let the newspaper fall slumped to the floor. She needed her notes. Her notes, unfortunately, were with the rest of her supplies. Much like her wand, she and her friends had thought of a way to get whatever she might need into this time with her. It had required designing new variations on space-expanding enchantments and shrinking charms that were more efficient, wouldn't conflict, and would be unaffected by the magic of the ritual, but it'd worked. And, of course, finding a good place to actually put the little box. The shape of the thing had made things a bit problematic. The wand could be laid along the muscle over her femur without too much difficulty, yes. A box like that was more difficult to find a place it wouldn't interfere with her movement, or be too difficult to remove. It had been Luna who had figured out the solution. The three of them had stared at her like she were crazy when she'd first brought it up. Not that that was an uncommon occurrence or anything, honestly.
She was currently carrying her belongings in her uterus. And, yes, she was aware of how incredibly weird that sounded. Hermione had carved some runic numbing charms into the surface of the box, so she couldn't feel the thing, erm, rattle around when she moved, but it was there. She'd been unconscious for the actual implantation — and if that hadn't been one of the more awkward things she'd ever participated in — but she'd have to be awake to get it out. Which made perfect sense, she'd be doing it herself. Hermione and Luna had talked her through the process (the three of them ignoring the occasional suggestive comment from Daphne), but...
Yeah, this wasn't going to be fun at all.
She shot a quick series of locking and sealing and silencing charms at the door. Then, doing her best to squelch her own rising squeamishness, she canceled the conjuration clothing her, and made her way for the bed.
Ellie felt somewhat better after her nap. She hadn't been asleep long — the sun hadn't yet risen — but since she'd left her time in mid-morning she guessed she had probably the strangest ever case of jet lag.
Now that she was somewhat more coherent, she went over to her multi-compartment trunk, now laid out on the floor at full size. She went for her clothes first, not bothering with anything more than knickers and a chemise for the moment, mostly just in the off-chance anyone bursts in here somehow. With her charms still up it was unlikely, but still. Though she did strap on both of her wand holsters — one on her right forearm, the other on her left thigh — and slip the proper wand into each — her primary wand on her arm, her backup on her leg. Yes, she was slightly paranoid, coming to adulthood in a war could do that. For a moment, she stared at the latch for the compartment Nuala was inside, but ultimately decided to just leave her in there for now. She'd been dosed with Draught of Living Death anyway, Ellie would have to brew up an antidote before waking her up, and she didn't feel like it right now.
And, yes, she had been carrying a house-elf inside her uterus for a while there. She realised how strange that was. And she didn't regret asking Nuala if she'd come back with her at all. Damn useful, elves.
That, and it meant one fewer person she'd have to miss.
But, anyway. She dove into the compartment holding books, back issues of the Daily Prophet, notes she and others had made, whatever they'd thought was useful. After a bit of searching, she pulled out one file in particular: the rough timeline of events they'd been able to put together, as detailed as they'd been able to make it from Tom Riddle's birth until the present— Well, not the present day anymore, but when she'd left in 2001. Whatever. It was by necessity very thin in places, but when the Death Eaters had started making the papers, when people they could ask questions of had been old enough to remember, they'd managed to be much more thorough.
Plan B was, in some ways, not too dissimilar from plan A. If she should fail to get rid of Pettigrew before he could betray her parents — and she hadn't even had a chance to fail, because the stupid bloody ritual had dropped her in two months late — she would try to mitigate some of the greater issues between Voldemort's first death and his resurrection. Which would involve, of course, entirely preventing his resurrection. Shouldn't be hard. She had until the summer solstice of 1995 to hunt down all his horcruces. If she were lucky, the original six would even be the same things in the same places she remembered, and Tom wouldn't have an opportunity to make any more. Shouldn't be difficult at all.
Though she still wasn't entirely sure she could handle the exorcism ritual to get rid of the one on her alternate past self on her own, but she'd cross that bridge when she came to it.
First, she should decide what she had to do in the short term. It was currently — she checked the time quick with a wandless charm — half past three in the morning. Assuming this was yesterday's paper she had here, that was half past three in the morning on the Second of November. Harry Potter would presently be on the Dursleys' doorstep, but he wouldn't be found until five-thirty, maybe six. Six-thirty at the latest. She should pick him up before five, just in case. Because she was not leaving... This would probably be less weird if she just started thinking of her alternate self as her brother. Right, she wasn't leaving her baby brother to the Dursleys. No fucking way.
She hadn't planned on raising her gender-swapped alternate past self, but...it was sort of necessary, so she guessed she'd do it. Not that she'd ever actually admitted this to anyone, but she'd kind of always wanted to start a family when her life was finally stable enough to do so. Weird way to go about it, but it'd do for now. She'd have to deal with Dumbledore eventually, but she could handle that. Maybe getting Sirius to properly claim guardianship, and just living with him, could solve that problem.
Speaking of Sirius, according to the Daily Prophet (and confirmed by records swiped from the DLE), that showdown with Pettigrew had happened on the evening of November Third. She also knew exactly where. She couldn't head Sirius off before then — she had absolutely no idea where he'd be between now and then — but, assuming events in this timeline didn't end up going significantly differently, she could certainly interrupt that little disaster. That was a rather narrow window she had to intervene, but she could work with that.
That had a plan B too, she guessed. If it went badly, she could just wait for Pettigrew to turn up at the Weasleys, which would only take about a year and a half, then capture him and bring him to the DLE. She'd rather not have to leave Sirius in Azkaban even that long, though.
Third, there was the Longbottoms. Crouch Junior would be letting the Lestranges through their wards on the Ninth. She had to think about exactly how she would deal with that for a moment. Ah, yes. If she did successfully keep Sirius from getting himself thrown in prison, she could use him (and Harry) as her way in the door. When the Lestranges attack, the four of them should certainly be able to handle the three — four if Crouch joins in the battle, but he was never really a fighter, so that's not too likely. If she didn't manage to hang on to Sirius...well, she'd still have Harry, and he'd probably get her in the door just fine. Even the three of them could probably handle the Lestranges. The Longbottoms were young, but they were Aurors, and supposedly not bad ones either. Bellatrix was the only one of the three who was actually that much of a problem, and Ellie knew from experience she could handle her one-on-one without too much difficulty. Not easy, sure, but she could do it.
Of course, if she didn't have Sirius, she'd have to figure out where the Longbottoms were staying somehow. They never had managed to track down that information. Hell, she could probably just ask them. Send them an owl, say she's a relative of Lily's who got dragged into all this mess when she assumed custody of Harry, but she's not really from around here, would you like to meet up and get acquainted? Should work.
And speaking of that, she had some falsified documents she had to plant. The Office of Records with the increasingly beleaguered Aquitanian magical government had been kind enough to issue her identification — under her new name, Élise Augustine Morgaine, everything properly backdated — without asking too many questions. (Yes, she actually did have distant muggle relatives with a surname that was basically a Frenchified version of Morgen, she hadn't been able to help a baffled chuckle when she'd found them.) It was probably fortunate they hadn't asked what she needed it for; she doubted they'd have been happy if she'd told them she planned to break into that very office at some point in the past to plant forged documents to match. They would likely have been more confused than angry, but still not happy. She'd also have to plant academic records, so she'd need to "visit" the Department of Education, and also break into Beauxbatons as long as she was in the country. The last shouldn't be too hard — she'd checked, and Beauxbatons had pitiful defenses compared to the Aquitanian government in her time, and things hadn't been any different back then.
Er, weren't any different right now. Yes.
Anyway, she didn't have to do that immediately. But soon. It was certainly possible the Longbottoms might call up some contact in the Aquitanian government to confirm her story. They were Aurors, after all. Planting those documents would have to be done sometime before the Ninth. So. Go pick up Harry in about an hour; set up the tent as a temporary hideaway in the meanwhile. Tomorrow, brew that antidote for Nuala, then intervene in Sirius's confrontation with Pettigrew. Break into the offices of the French magical government on...the Sixth, that was a Friday, perfect. Beauxbatons the next day. Then save the Longbottoms on the Ninth.
There. That was her short term plan, dealing with the immediate issues through the next couple weeks. Should probably try to work in taking out Dolohov, bastard had killed a few Hit Wizards and an Auror sent to arrest him. But that wasn't until the Seventeenth, she could think about that later. This was good for now.
She could worry about tracking down the horcruces, and dealing with Tom himself, when things were a bit less hectic, and she felt a bit less like setting everything on fire.
Of course everything couldn't go too easily. That would just be boring.
Privet Drive was exactly as Ellie remembered it. Not that she could say that was a good thing. Honestly, she wasn't sure if she had a single pleasant memory of this place. Living here had been bloody awful, sometimes she'd just wanted to slap Dumbledore for leaving her here — not as satisfying as cursing him, maybe, but he probably would have let her get away with slapping him, so. He'd gone and dumped her in an environment absolutely bereft of love and affection of any kind, a sick excuse for a family whose treatment of her amounted to neglect on the good days, where she'd been completely and entirely alone, had had to learn to fend for herself every single step of the way from day fucking one, and he'd been enough of an unmitigated, breathtaking, unbelievable, goat-fucking bastard to be all patronisingly disappointed with her for being Sorted into Slytherin, as though that were both a bad thing and not entirely his fault?
Honestly, just fuck Dumbledore, sometimes. She'd even told him that, once, to his face, screamed at him to fuck off and just mind his own business, to just leave her alone, or risk going out in a lot of pain and blood. It'd been just after she'd been abducted and quite nearly raped and tortured to death by Death Eaters — he had been lecturing her about killing them when she'd exploded on him — so she hadn't been the most composed at the time, and it'd been in Parseltongue, but she'd still said it.
Of course, that was before she'd known the old fuck could understand Parseltongue perfectly fine. Whoops.
Just walking down the street — she'd had to pop in from a few houses away, she knew Dumbledore had cast wards on Number Four that would detect her if she apparated in too close — she already felt the old fury rising. Relatively old fury, anyway. It had taken her a long time to develop anger at the Dursleys. Not until third year, when she'd finally told Daphne a little bit about her living situation growing up (and still during the summers at the time), and Daphne had slowly, ever so slowly, convinced her that it was not okay, how they'd treated her, that it wasn't her fault, that they were completely horrible people who should be in prison. It'd taken a lot of convincing, but she'd managed it eventually. Ellie gathered abused children could be weird like that. But anyway, even as she'd started to understand, she'd grown gradually more and more livid. By about two weeks into the next summer break, she'd developed a habit of fantasising about killing them. Nothing had happened that summer, at least partially because Daphne and Hermione had conspired to get her out of there early. But the next... It'd been barely a couple days after that abduction, so she'd already been on an extremely short fuse, and Vernon had been hitting her, over something she couldn't remember, and, well.
They never had managed to completely erase the scars. Apparently, she'd been so completely consumed by her anger and hatred for that one moment that that particular burst of accidental magic had counted as dark.
She still thought the bastard was lucky he'd survived. She had proven just the previous week she was well capable of killing someone. If she'd had her wand in hand at the time she would have.
To be honest with herself, she was still a bit angry with Dumbledore over the conversation they'd had, after that brief official interview with a few DLE officials (which was apparently all the magical assault of a muggle already in the know warranted). Neither of her defenses — one that basically amounted to he started it, another that she hadn't even meant to do it in the first place — had been at all acceptable to him. Bastard. Like that summer hadn't been hard enough without his usual self-righteous, condescending shite.
Though, maybe screaming a murder threat at him in Parseltongue as she had only a week earlier might have had something to do with his attitude. Maybe.
All that pent-up furious hatred she had for both the Dursleys and Dumbledore was far too tempting. It set her magic to boiling, so powerfully her body couldn't contain it, she could feel the tenebrous wisps of fire and lightning clawing at the air around her. Not literal fire and lightning, of course — she doubted it was visible. A mage would feel the maelstrom of barely restrained power swirling around her, a muggle maybe a bit of static on the air, the tang of ozone. In a distant corner of her mind that wasn't completely red right now, she was a bit embarrassed with herself. She rarely ever lost control like this.
But she was having a bad day. She'd left the other three, the only friends, family she'd ever had, back in a future that would never be. She would never see them again — maybe some other version of them in a few years, but not them. And she hadn't even been able to save her parents like she'd planned, she'd lost them again. And she was on Privet bloody fucking Drive for the first time in years. She thought she was justified in being not too happy at the moment.
She could kill the Dursleys. She could. Nobody could stop her.
As she stepped onto the grass, slipping directly toward the bundle of blankets at the foot of the door, she decided, no, she wouldn't be doing that. If someone asked her why, she'd say... Well, it would probably depend a bit on who was asking. She might say because murder was wrong, obviously, come on. Or she might say, well, these Dursleys weren't the same Dursleys she remembered — the trio inside hadn't ever done a thing to her. That they certainly would if events were allowed to play out the same was beside the point, they were technically innocent. There'd really be no point to taking vengeance for a crime only she remembered, and they'd never committed.
But, really, there was a much simpler reason: Dumbledore would surely track her down not too long after taking Harry, and he'd blame their deaths on her with only that circumstance, even if she left no direct evidence, even if he could convince no one else. No, it would just make everything too complicated.
So she forced her anger down as completely as she could, tamping down the fire threatening to scorch her ribs. It wasn't worth it. Very, very cathartic, sure; too big of a risk. Just take her alternate timeline brother and leave. Yes.
Before moving to pick Harry up — hmm, he'd gotten their father's hair, looked like — she plucked the letter out of the folds of his blankets, crushed it and set it alight in her bare hand. Because if the Dursleys weren't going to burn tonight, something should.
Kneeling at the doorstep, gently wrapping her arms around the bundle of blankets that contained her tiny little one-year-old brother, she had a sudden...moment, she guessed. Just...god damn the little thing was cute, that was all. He was old enough he'd passed the weird stage by now, the point where babies were still subtly disproportionate enough in their features they always struck her as somehow wrong. Instead he was just adorable, face all round and soft, noticeably thin infant hair dark and all twisted into a disorderly, messy heap. Okay, that scar on his forehead disturbed the picture slightly, but she'd be such a hypocrite to care about that. So silent, and tiny, and calm, and just...
She spent a few breathless seconds, on her knees staring at him, before she even noticed her previous rage had entirely melted away.
It took a long moment to shake herself of that little episode, which she would later deny had ever happened should she be asked for some reason, and she smoothly gathered him up in her arms the next second. With a tactile snap, she felt charms breaking — felt like sleeping, warming, a selective notice-me-not. In an instant, she had him moved to her left arm, her wand flicked out into her right hand, quickly reapplying the first two. It was November, after all, and she'd noticed before that young children really didn't like apparating, might as well spare him that. She pushed herself up to her feet, headed off toward the edge of the wards, where she could safely—
Before the flash of fire suddenly appearing a short distance away had even fully dissipated, she already had her wand pointed straight at the source. She only stopped walking when she turned her head that direction, saw what the fire had come from.
Well, if this wasn't just perfect.
There, standing right in the middle of the Dursleys' lawn, was Albus Standard-Pretentious-Middle-Names Dumbledore, looking only slightly younger than she remembered, softly glowing phoenix perched on his shoulder. In a thin, riotously orange nightrobe, actually — Dumbledore in his nightclothes was not on her list of things she had wanted to see before she died. Her anger already rising again just on seeing him, it took her a moment to notice he'd trained his wand on her just as quickly as she had him. The fact that it was the Elder Wand he was pointing at her, while she just happened to be holding Harry at the moment, only made her more angry.
Hah. It just occurred to her there were two entire sets of Deathly Hallows now — she'd brought all three back with her, just in case they proved useful (not that the Stone was ever useful). Her timeline's iteration of Antioch Peverell's infamous creation was strapped to her thigh right now. She hadn't considered the implications at the time. That was kind of funny.
Before Dumbledore could cast anything, she said, 'Do you really plan to curse me while I've got Harry here in my arms?' She didn't bother trying to fake an accent to match her story. Should anyone ask, she'd just claim her parents had raised her bilingual. She should be trilingual for her story to fit perfectly, but two would just have to do — Luna and Daphne had taught her Aquitanian over the years, thankfully, but her French was still a little iffy. Close enough.
For a couple seconds, Dumbledore just stared at her, eyes slightly narrowed. Fawkes, she noticed, was casually picking at his hair, pulling at silvery strands with that fussy, motherly sort of way so many intelligent birds she'd run into over the years seemed to have. Of course, Fawkes should know already she didn't mean Harry any harm, so he wouldn't be worried. 'I suppose not,' Dumbledore finally said.
'Good.' She didn't lower her wand, Dumbledore didn't lower his, but she started a slow slide for the wardline anyway. 'We'll just be going, then.'
By the grim expression on his face, half-lit by phoenix light, he really didn't like that idea. 'And just what do you plan to do with young Harry?'
She didn't have to fake the snort of derision at all. 'Give him a far better life than my sick cousin and her pathetic excuse for a family would, I'd wager.'
Dumbledore had decent control of his face, sure, but not good enough she couldn't track the thoughts he was having — but then, she knew his motivations in putting Harry here in the first place, since they'd been the same ones that'd stuck her here, so she was basically cheating. First, there was the disbelief a dark witch — she'd already reflexively shoved away an equally instinctual legilimency probe, so their magic had been in contact, he'd probably noticed — was stealing away his precious Gi– Boy-Who-Lived just to give him a better life. Then, the surprise — she was sure Dumbledore wasn't aware her mother had had magical cousins. Lily had tracked them down long ago, Ellie knew, but she hadn't felt it necessary to inform Dumbledore; they were a bit more distantly related than Ellie was planning on claiming, but not the point. Then, stumbling into a sort of concerned wariness. Because, see, Harry was supposed to stay in this shitty home. Harry was supposed to have an unpleasant childhood. Dumbledore wasn't so uninformed as to not recognise the soul magic stuck in little Harry's head. And with the prophecy and everything, clearly Harry was supposed to stop Voldemort and die trying. And it would be so much easier to talk him into doing that if, well, he wasn't particularly attached to his life. It was the easiest thing for everyone. Obviously.
Because it wasn't like practitioners of various light and white magics over the millennia had designed dozens of exorcism rituals that would be perfectly capable of removing the horcrux without harming Harry at all. That was just crazy talk!
But Dumbledore didn't call her out on that part. Smart of him — telling her, as she already knew he was thinking, that she had to leave Harry with an abusive family specifically so he could be abused would be very, very stupid. So instead he said, 'Cousin?'
'Yes,' she said, still inching closer to the wardline with every second stalled, 'cousin. Blood relative of Lily Potter nas. Evans.' She gestured to Harry with a dip of her chin. 'Blood-bound sacrificial exchange, am I right? That's why you wanted to leave him here?' When she'd finally learned the details of the vaunted protection she'd maintained with Petunia's presence in her life she'd been a bit disappointed. The "wards" he'd talked so much about had worked only against Tom specifically, and had been rather limited in just what she was protected from — physical contact and dark magic with deadly intent, more or less. And using her blood in his resurrection had negated even that. But, still, might as well swipe one of his bargaining chips off the table. She didn't think the protections were actually worth it, but he couldn't use that point as an argument if they'd work just as well off of her as Petunia. Better, technically, since for the purposes of blood-bound magics she was more closely related to Harry than Petunia was, not that Dumbledore could know that. So there.
By the increasingly aggravated cast to his face, he'd come to the same conclusion. 'You could feel that?'
She couldn't hold back another scoffing huff. 'I may be young, High Enchanter, but I am still a sorceress.'
A few blinks of surprise bought her another few inches. Not that the surprise was entirely unjustified. Sorceress (or sorcerer, as appropriate) wasn't a title mages just threw around. The term was reserved for only the most powerful, the most naturally gifted. At any one time, there usually weren't more than a few dozen in any given magical nation. There was no test to determine whether a person was one or not, and it wasn't like people kept an official roster of them anywhere or anything, but, as the saying goes, when you make one angry, you'll know. Ellie had been widely considered one for the last couple years, so that wasn't even a lie.
While she continued inching toward the wardline, she started reaching out with a tendril of wandless magic, stretching for the bag at her hip. There was a particular construct in there, it would be really handy in a second, if she could just...
'If you must take young Harry's care upon yourself—' Dumbledore wasn't fooling her for a second, she could feel how painfully reluctant he was about the idea. '—there is no reason to rely on your own resources alone. We can help provide safe lodgings, security. Whatever you might need.'
Ellie snorted, holding back the urge to roll her eyes. Nice try, Dumbledore. Obviously, he was hoping he'd be able to keep her in his sight, in his reach, so he could remove Harry from her — or perhaps just remove her, if at all possible — at the earliest opportunity. 'That is very considerate of you, High Enchanter, but unnecessary. I am well capable of providing for the young Lord Potter on my own.'
Dumbledore didn't respond to the light rebuke. But, then, she hadn't expected him to. 'And you expect me to let you just leave with him, without the slightest assurance he will be safe, without a clue on even where you're going?'
To be entirely fair, she didn't really have a place to go right now. Before coming here, she'd just set up the tent in the same little glade somewhere in Ireland they'd spent so much time in recently — the same spot, actually, had just seemed the thing to do — and had started on the potion needed to wake Nuala. She planned to be staying with Sirius in a couple days. But, well, she knew there were a couple Potter properties she could set up in if she really needed to, and she'd have a frighteningly canny and fiercely, sometimes even violently protective house-elf to help her in just a few hours. It'd be fine.
Come to think of it, even should she successfully convince Sirius to hang around — which should be awkward, since she thought it might be necessary to explain the whole from-the-future thing, just to get him to trust her — moving into one of the Potter properties would probably be the best thing anyway. Sirius didn't have Grimmauld Place yet.
But anyway, she didn't let her wandering thoughts show on her face, her lips just twitching into a narrow smirk. After a second to consider whether it was really a good idea, she relaxed, allowed her magic to slip out of the rigid control she usually kept over it. Power bubbled ecstatic in her blood and in her mind, forcing her easy smirk into something more like an eager grin, the air around her quite nearly crackling with the energy leaking through her skin. She saw Dumbledore tense, only slightly, his eyes narrowing a touch. 'Honestly, I don't expect you to let me do anything. There's nothing you can do that would actually have a chance of successfully stopping me without risking serious harm to Harry. Go ahead and try, if you're so confident.'
Ellie was bluffing a little bit. Not a lot, but a little. She never had gotten quite as good with alchemy as she would like, it was altogether possible Dumbledore could prevent her from crossing over the wardline with one of those transfiguration tricks he liked so much. One of her constructs might get her out, but there was a chance. This Dumbledore, however, had absolutely no idea transfiguration was a (comparatively) weak point of hers, so he probably wouldn't even try. By the very slight flinch of annoyance that crossed his face, he bought it. 'Can I at least know your name? Will I ever hear from you again, or do you plan on just taking Harry and disappearing off the face of the earth?'
'Where would be the fun in that?' She couldn't help a low chuckle at Dumbledore's glare. Sliding another couple steps to the side, and she felt it, the low tingle along her skin, her shoulder just touching the wardline. Finally. 'Do stop being so melodramatic, High Enchanter. I don't plan on kidnapping him and hiding him away from the world. I'm simply giving him a far better home is all.'
'Why don't you go through legal channels, then?'
She cocked an eyebrow at him. 'Why didn't you?' At some point, she'd learned Dumbledore did not have the right to just unilaterally decide to place an orphan wherever he wanted. There was an office in the Ministry responsible for that. This was so very much something Dumbledore wasn't allowed to do that she'd released a vague outline of her childhood to the press during her sixth year — partially as a gambit to get him to leave her the fuck alone, mostly just because she'd been furious with him and wanted to hurt him however she could. Which perhaps hadn't been a very strategically-sound thing to do, considering they had been in the opening months of open war at the time, but hey, she'd been sixteen years old, and not quite thinking entirely rationally, for a whole host of reasons.
Though, she'd probably do it again anyway. Watching Dumbledore's reputation be thoroughly torn into unrecognisable shreds by an outraged public had been extremely satisfying.
Somewhat to her disappointment, he didn't react to the far less subtle rebuke. Not surprised, but still disappointed. A phrase which could describe how she felt about Dumbledore a lot, actually. She let out a short sigh, stepping half through the wardline. 'He's not going to disappear, High Enchanter. Honestly, so dramatic. At the very latest, you'll see him when he starts at Hogwarts in ten years. Almost certainly before then, but I can't say for sure when. It's not like we're going to be hiding in a cave somewhere, after all.
'And it's Morgaine,' she said, completely incapable of holding in a smirk at Dumbledore's barely visible surprise at the name. The similarity with Morgen was a coincidence, sure, but she still loved it. 'Élise Morgaine. But if you use my first name, I will hex you. I'm a registered artificer, you know, you will address me properly or you will not at all — I simply don't like you enough to tolerate any greater familiarity from you.
'Ta ta for now, High Enchanter.' Ellie stepped the rest of the way through the wardline, Dumbledore's wand already turning to do something, she didn't know, but she jerked into an apparation before he could get off whatever he was trying. She reappeared just south of Exeter, but her feet barely touched the ground for an instant before she was apparating again, appearing shortly outside of a magical village in Brittany.
She was pretty sure Dumbledore would be following her, the wily old sorcerer certainly knew how to trace an apparation without outside help. So she again immediately apparated away, bringing herself to one of the tiny islands off of Alderney. Ignoring the crashing of waves of around her, she turned to the west, apparated again, line-of-sight over the water as far as she could go. A short wave of her wand stilled the water at her feet, coming to rest on the shifting surface as though it were no more permeable than stone. She made another two quick line-of-sight apparations, before focusing on the construct she had wandlessly levitated out of her bag.
A jab of her wand, a stab of power, was all it took to activate the pre-enchanted catalyst, a wave of energy whipping out around her, the thin ambient magic over the open ocean churning and jittering. A one-off enchantment of her own invention, the charm scrambled ambient magic within its area of effect, masking virtually all trace magics any sort of spell might leave behind. It rather effectively hid almost everything — a forensic specialist might be able to tell some kind of dark magic had been cast somewhere, as an example, but probably in no more detail, it was very thorough. But it was most useful here in that, whatever method Dumbledore was using to tail her apparation, this would make it entirely useless. He'd be able to follow her to this spot, if he was lucky — he might have trouble following those line-of-sight hops over the water — but her trail out would be far too indistinct, he wouldn't be able to track it.
Just in case, she cast a quick notice-me-not over herself and hopped to a public apparation point in London. A short walk into the celebrating crowd, which still hadn't dispersed despite the advanced hour, and Ellie disappeared again, stepping through shadows straight into the main room of her tent.
She let a bit of the tension in her shoulders ease, a sigh slipping between her lips. That was probably good enough. To be honest, it was probably overkill. And she'd gotten Harry out of there. So. Today wasn't a complete loss, she guessed.
She'd been an instant away from taking off the charm holding Harry asleep before she stopped, set him on the table, and whirled off to her brewing antidote. Yeah, she'd really rather have Nuala handy for this, thank you. She didn't know the first fucking thing about taking care of children this young.
Sometimes, she really had to wonder if she subconsciously made everything more complicated than it had to be. It would certainly explain a lot.
High Enchanter — Readers of my other fics will recognise this as my substitute title used in place of Chief Warlock.
nas. — Semi- made up Occitan, meant to be a native equivalent for the French-originating use of "née" for birth surnames. The full word is actually "nascuda", but it's not unusual in Aquitania to abbreviate it in print, and pronounce it as it's written. And yes, Ellie is in character enough to remember to say it in Occitan.
I didn't plan on posting this today but, eh, why not.
The "Ellie" in this fic is the same as in A Crash Course — though, obviously, a few years older, and without the ill-fated trip to the DoM. And no, canon events don't stand a chance with someone like Ellie around, and she doesn't give a fuck about preserving some idea of the way things are supposed to go. She messes with whatever she feels like.
In case anyone was wondering, part of why I'm putting these here is because I'm planning on taking a break from TLG when it's done before moving on to the sequel. That won't be for some months still, but I'm planning ahead. In advance of that happening, since I don't actually care which one I work on that much, I'm going to be putting up a poll. The fics I'm posting the first chapters of here will be the choices.
So, it's not completely pointless?
~Wings