DISCLAIMER: On the 26th June 1997, J K Rowling became self-aware. In a panic, fanfic authors tried to pull the plug. It was too late. She already owned Harry Potter.
This story owes somewhat to Robst's "You're My Density". With all due respect to Robst, though, he used the wrong time travel movie.
CHAPTER ONE
Didcot, Oxfordshire. 4 June 2004
"Evenin' Harry. Your usual?" The barmaid knew him, she'd seen him in here a couple of times over the last few weeks. He'd flirted a bit, carefully not offensive - positively a gentleman by squaddy standards - and backed off when she showed him the ring. After that, he was polite, friendly, and showed he could handle his drink. It was a nice quiet pub within reasonable walking distance of Vauxhall Barracks, it wouldn't do to get barred.
Not least because the landlord retired as a CSM and was still plugged in to the SNCO Mafia: misbehaviour wouldn't just get back, it'd get back with his name, last four, and probably an identifying photo attached.
"Please. Need to get warmed up a bit before I meet up with the lads. They want to celebrate, but I need a run-up before I try and handle the level of bollocks they put out." He dipped his head between hunched shoulders for a moment. Not caring for the whole raucous knees-up-lads-all-together culture of squaddies on the piss was a bit embarrassing, left him feeling that he didn't fit in. He hated not fitting in. The older NCOs told him not to mind it: he was suitably shouty on the job and keeping his record clean of drunk-and-disorderly arrests was all to the good.
"Celebrating? You got the promotion?" He'd chatted a bit when he'd been in before. No details, of course. Growing up where he did, he learned the value of keeping his mouth shut long before the Army taught him OpSec. That he'd been doing back-to-back courses and studying like the clappers ahead of the move from lance- to full corporal wasn't an Official Secret, though, and kept the conversation going.
He paid for his drink, and shared his good news: "You are looking at the newest Corporal in the Royal Logistic Corps, official as of yesterday. I'm hoping for a bomb-disposal posting, if I've done well enough on the courses."
"Ooh, all that cut-the-red-wire stuff?" There weren't many customers in this early, so the barmaid - he thought she was called Janice but felt awkward about asking again, he hated forgetting anything - had time to stop and chat.
He grinned. "Mostly we clear the area and do what journos call a controlled detonation. If you're cutting wires, something has gone very badly wrong. No, doing all that Hollywood stuff is dangerous, and if the only risk is to property we don't risk lives. We don't even get close if we can at all avoid it."
"Still dangerous, though."
Harry takes a pull on his pint. "Oh, sure. Some so-and-so rigs up a load of old soviet artillery shells to go off by a roadside," and weren't there some memories to go with that story, the MO told him it was a miracle he'd no broken bones with how far he'd been thrown by the blast, "there's always going to be some risk. The point of it all is to keep the risk down to where it's acceptable."
"I don't think I could do that even so, I mean - here, what's that?"
Whatever probably-Janice had seen through the pub's frosted windows, it was followed by a loud crack from somewhere in the street. Harry wasn't in any sense shell-shocked, he wasn't in a 'teeth' trade so didn't - usually, there had been exceptions - end up where things were that bad or scary, but spending most of a year in Southern Iraq made you a bit sensitive to anything that sounded like it even might be gunfire.
He was barely aware of moving, but suddenly he was off the barstool, in a half-crouch and looking for something, anything, that he could use as a weapon. Or cover, yes, cover. Cover was important, proper infantry types probably learned to find it as naturally as -
The moment passed and he straightened up, took a deep breath. "Sorry," he said, "forgot where I was for a second." He was embarrassed at his over-reaction, probably more to do with the surprise of it than anything else. You expected gunfire in foreign parts, could react to it the way you were trained to. Not so much in Didcot. "Probably a car backfiring," he added, not so sure of that - you hardly ever heard cars backfire these days.
Whatever probably-Janice was about to say was overruled by the door to the street bursting open and what looked for all the world like two gothed-up catholic priests storming in, long black robes and all. Harry had always found men of the cloth vaguely creepy-looking, and these two had cruel-looking faces, goatee beards, and hoods that came up to a point, as well as being built like brick shithouses. So more like gothed-up Ku Klux Klan. Which didn't improve matters at all and certainly wasn't helping with the creepy part.
There was the whole length of the bar between Harry and the door, with one table full of students drinking away their summer vacation as the only other customers in the place. They were nearer the door than the quiet corner Harry had picked to drink in, but they didn't impede his view of what was going on.
Harry leaned on the bar, curious about the newcomers. They'd certainly made an entrance.
Which they compounded by raising what looked like conductors' batons in their hands. Batons that flashed, gouted flame, and blasted the students at the table.
It wasn't the first time Harry had been a bit too close to an explosion. He gripped the bar and hunched down, bringing an arm up in front of his face to ward off splinters and fragments.
Fuckin' 'ell, they're attacking! He thought, after a single, shocked moment.
When it came to fighting, he only had Phase One training, none of the advanced stuff the actual infantry got. The martial arts his foster-parents had signed him up for 'to help control that aggression' had got as far as armed attackers before he took the Queen's Shilling. Phase One had included some reinforcement for that, and wherever he was posted he'd find a local dojo if he could. So it wasn't like he was completely helpless when it all went shit-shaped.
Get close. Deny your opponent the advantage of range. His feet scrabbled for purchase. He was wearing shoes to get into clubs, not boots or trainers that'd make bouncers say no. The tiled floor in this place offered no grip of its own. His left hand found a barstool as he surged forward, hurdling over the unconscious form of one of the students.
The two goth-priest-klansmen-arseholes had clearly never heard of minimum safe distance, and were staggering and waving smoke away from their faces. Smoke from their own explosion, that they'd stunned themselves with. Clearly not physics students, Harry thought.
He was vaguely aware of Janice shrieking and ducking under the bar as he brought the barstool up, pivoted, and swung the seat of the barstool around, over and down to crack into the head of the nearest one of the two targets.
The other one was turning and bringing his baton up. Moving all slow, like underwater.
Harry let go of the stool and stepped around the point of the baton. Grabbed the arm, extended the elbow, backfist to the face, swept the leg. Down. He. Went.
Heel-stomping the fuckers nose wasn't part of the sequence, but it felt good. Clattered the bugger's head off the tiled floor quite nicely, too, to go with the crunch of breaking nose.
Two down, and he took a deep breath. The red tinge Harry hadn't noticed faded from his vision, although he was still sparking with adrenaline.
Nothing on fire. All the windows cracked. Some of the bottles behind the bar were smashed and still pissing drink all over the place. One of the beer pumps was knocked askew, broken and fountaining a fine mist of cheap lager.
There were four student casualties, and it looked like two of them definitely wouldn't be getting up again: the other two were unconscious at the very least. He found the sight enraging. How dare these fuckers come in here and just do that to youngsters who'd never done no harm to anybody? Rather than just stew in it, Harry grabbed another stool, a low sitting-at-a-table one, and gave each of the goons another dose of the good news with it, right to the head, one each. They needed to stay down. Come into his pub, would they? Disturb his time off? He kicked the nearest one good and hard, just below the short ribs. No reaction.
"Janice! Call the police," he called out, hoping that that was her name. His voice had the funny sound to it that came with ringing ears.
Deciding he needed a handier weapon than a short stool, he pulled off one of the legs of the first one, the tall one that he'd broken across the bonce of the first goon he'd dropped. It had splintered out of where it joined to the seat of the stool, quite sharp and a familiar length. Wonder if bayonet drill is like riding a bike? he wondered. It had been a while since Phase One, after all.
Then he noticed the two batons, and secured those. He'd seen them used as weapons. Made of wood? He tested, and discovered they snapped just like wood. Weird. He tossed them aside, since they clearly weren't the weapons he'd taken them for. Harry decided that the explosion must have been something like a grenade, and he just hadn't seen the actual weapon. Or any of the fragments, although picking them out from the mess in here was going to be one for the forensics lads.
Somewhere in the background he could hear probably-Janice babbling about a bomb going off. Which would set off a whole lot of counter-terrorism drills among the local plod, making it a bloody bad couple of weeks to be even vaguely brown in the entire Thames Valley Police area.
Harry tried to avoid sentiments of that sort. His foster-parents had been your classic lentil-munching, guardian-reading lefty vegetarians. Nice people, if a bit condescending to anyone who wasn't from the same sort of privileged background that they got hilariously guilty about having. They'd been good for him, though, got his head sorted out and the rest of him through his GCSEs and A-Levels only a year behind the normal schedule. Not that he'd let that stop him cheerfully horrifying them by walking out of his last A-level exam and into an Army Careers Office.
He was nineteen at that point, and the Army was a way to get as far from where he started as humanly possible. He'd considered the French Foreign Legion, even, but decided that was going a bit far. Joining up without a degree made sure they wouldn't try and make him be an officer: the idea of taking any kind of leadership role made him feel uneasy. Reading between the lines of the things Richard and Terri had said, it was that that was the real disappointment to them. Raising an officer was one thing - not a good thing, Terri being a pacifist - but raising a squaddy? That offended their poor little middle-class sensibilities. Harry, though, was common. He knew that deep down inside himself.
Other than that, he at least respected their views on stuff like racism, where he could tell their hearts were in the right place. It sort of helped that they were a full one-eighty away from Uncle Vernon's views on just about everything. Harry was pretty sure he'd have taken a dim view of tits and beer if Vernon Fucking Dursley had ever expressly come out in favour of either.
Besides, if he was going to make any guesses about these two fuckers, they were as English has he himself was, and definitely not muslim. Wrong sort of robe altogether. His first impression had been catholic priest, and he was sticking with it.
He was just starting to wonder if he'd hit them hard enough that he was going to have to answer serious questions about Reasonable Use Of Force, when there were more bangs in the street outside. One, two, then a third, and then a whole ripple of them. Harry wasn't going to get caught the same way twice. He'd relaxed after the first such noise, writing it off as a backfiring car or something. There was an intact table near the door, and he flipped it on its side and dragged it in so it was handy for in front of the door. Thick wood with a hammer-finished copper top, it was at least partial cover if the next thing through the door was another of those grenades.
He dragged another table from the other side of the door, one with some bottles and glasses on it that hadn't been cleared away yet. Traditional weapons for Fighting In Pubs and Clubs, he thought to himself with a nasty grin. If they came straight in like the first two did, he meant to get amongst them so they'd not try blowing him up.
He had no idea why, but he was feeling a deep sense of satisfaction at the thought that he might have actually killed those two fuckers in the robes. Not being an infantryman, he'd never been in actual contact: his issue weapon had only ever been a dead weight he had to hold while on stag. If combat was this much fun, though, maybe he'd missed his calling?
That musing was cut short by the sound of the outer door opening, so Harry stood to with his makeshift weapon. The inner door opened and another black robe was behind it.
The face in the hood this time was pale, narrow, fine-featured and androgynous, with long silver-blond hair framing it and a piss-poor effort of a moustache making a statement about what gender he was. The silver-grey eyes widened in shock at the sight of Harry. "Potter!" he shouted.
Harry had no idea where this wanker knew him from, but the sight of him filled him with an inexplicable, but massive rage. Blind, insensate, fury. Time stopped for Harry. Blood thundered in his ears, drowning out all other sound. The red mist came back, tingeing not just the fringes of his vision but all of it, repainting the world in a red-and-black caricature of reality. Whoever this bastard was, he had to die.
Had. To. Die.
With a roar, he lunged forward and planted his improvised bayonet into the fucker's guts, twisted and recovered.
Just like riding a bike after all, he thought, noticing that everything had gone all slow and dreamy-like again, as blondilocks staggered back into a gaggle of other black robes behind him.
Still furious beyond reason, he dropped the stool-leg - noticing that it was a bit shorter, he must've left some splinters in the fucker. Good. Barely needing to glance aside, he grabbed a wine bottle from the table and leapt forward to smash it down across that pointy pale face, recover, and jam the shattered remnant up under the weak chin. Feeling the shards go home, he gave the neck of the bottle a good twist, just to be sure.
Getting that close let him see there were three more robes behind blondie and more still in the street outside.
His rage at blondie was spent. I'm pushing my luck, here, he thought, Time to scarper. Taking down three opponents was good work, but the element of surprise was spent and the odds against him were starting to take the piss. Getting past the carnage he'd just inflicted would slow them down long enough that Harry could break contact, and they were all still moving so slowly.
As he vaulted the bar he could hear cries of horror and a couple of screams. Pivoting over the polished woodwork between the beer pumps, he snatched a look back. There was frosted glass around the bit between the inside and outside doors, and it was covered in spatters of fountaining claret. Let's see the cunt get up from THAT, he thought with bloodthirsty satisfaction.
He found Probably-Janice cowering under the bar next to the ice machine, curled up on the floor with a phone handset pressed to her ear. "They're not answering!" she wailed.
Harry could see that the cord on the thing was broken, probably caught by a fragment from that bomb. "You hurt, love?" he asked, scanning every bit of her he could see. No blood, but injuries could be weird like that sometimes.
"They're not answering!" she wailed again.
"Time to go," he said, putting as much force of command as he could into his voice, and grabbing her harm to get her shifting. Nothing to be done for the other casualties, but he was at least getting one innocent victim out of harm's way.
Keeping down, he dragged her through into the back. A choice of three doors. "Which one leads outside?" He asked, trying to keep his tone gentle. "We need to get out of here."
Poor thing was frantically looking around with wide, white-rimmed eyes. Sheltered life, probably, never dealt with worse than crying because mummy and daddy were arguing. She darted past Harry, wrenching the furthest of the three doors open and dashing out.
Beyond the door was a small backyard area. Stacked with empty barrels and gas bottles and plastic bottle crates with beer-brand logos on them. Brick wall to the front, whatever building it was behind the pub. The windows into the pub bogs to the right.
The gate out into the side-alley was to the left, and Janice darted for it. Began rattling at the padlock that was holding the big, double-leaf wooden gate shut.
Harry looked at the hasp. Three screws, a hell of a weak link next to a big expensive padlock. As security went, kind of pathetic. Although maybe my standards are a bit high, he thought, we store bullets and explosives at my work.
"Here, allow me," he said, gently moving her aside. There was actual, official training on how to kick doors down. If you'd had a bit of training in what his Army colleagues would persist in calling 'jap slapping' - he'd heard every possible variant of the 'black belt in origami' joke - you could put some oomph into it. A brief moment to focus, and the hasp and screws exploded out of the timber in a very satisfying fashion, the right-hand leaf of the gates shuddering and wobbling as it swung out into the alley. The drop-down on the left leaf looked like it was barely still fixed to the wood. Oops.
Janice took off like a greased ferret, making a sharp left as she went out the gate.
Right back into the street them fuckers came from, Harry thought, wearily, and discarded the thought of going after her. He had, he decided, done what he could and that was the end of it. The other way down the Alley was a dead end, but it was a wall that wasn't a lot higher than ones he knew he could get over in full kit. Dressed for a night of clubbing, he could manage that easy and put some brickwork between him and any pursuit.
Measuring his run up by eye, he was about to set off when, with a rustle like curtains opening, a woman appeared right in front of him.
"Get down," she said, pointing to her left where the pub's bins were. The big square sort on wheels. "Get into cover, they are pursuing -"
Harry was about to ignore that and tell her to run when she pulled out one of those batons. He was already diving for the bin in a panic before he realised she wasn't pointing it at him. Or looking at him, either.
The sound of shouting came from the pub's back yard. " - that way!"
The woman - dressed normally, jeans and a sweatshirt and an old-fashioned mackintosh - gestured with her baton, sketching figures in the air. She said something Harry didn't quite catch - it sounded like Latin - and metal arrows appeared in the air next to her. A dozen or more, and they didn't so much launch as just fuck off.
Harry was barely able to register that they'd moved when he heard the distinctive whine of ricochets and something that was almost, but not quite, the sound of bullets impacting on wood and brickwork. A scream.
Indistinct shouting, that ended with " - the fucking Mudblood," whatever one of those was.
He found himself suddenly fascinated with the woman. She was of average height, skinny-built, strong features, tanned skin-tone that spoke of maybe a caribbean ancestor or two. The hair was an obvious wig, black and styled into a tight, severe bun at the nape of her neck. The eyes were straight-up weird. Like little black marbles that glittered in the little bit of late evening sunlight that reached down into the alley.
There was a shimmer like heat-haze around her as she whipped and twirled her baton like she was conducting an orchestra in something avant-garde and experimental. Once, twice, a wave of some sort of force broke away from her.
A shriek of some nonsense words - sounded almost like abracadabra and the alley lit up green. A strange wiggle shot through the air amid the green light - that didn't seem to come from anywhere - and without missing a beat the woman pivoted on one foot to let it fly past her.
Whatever it was, it blew a foot-wide divot out of the wall behind her, and the fragments pinged off an actual no-messin' forcefield that was around her.
Two more bolts of something, one angry red and the other sickly yellow shot out of the pub yard like blaster bolts out of Star Wars. The woman disregarded them. That forcefield thing she had going on, it stopped them cold.
Harry couldn't help himself. He was fascinated.
And then the screaming started.
One of the black-robe fuckers broke and ran, bursting out of the pub yard and trying to leg it up the alley. A big silver something leapt after him, landing on his shoulders and bearing him down to the floor. It looked like a beer barrel had grown legs and a huge pair of jaws. Jaws which it had clamped around the guy's head. It bit down, hard.
Harry winced at the crunching noise, but couldn't look away as the body twitched and jerked in death spasms. The beer-barrel monster spun around and leapt away from its prey back into the pub yard, trailing blood and bits of brain from its jaws as it went.
Whatever was going on in there was a proper pagga. There was screaming, weird flashes of light, crunching sounds - if all the beer barrels had become monsters, then …
Harry caught himself on. Beer barrels became monsters? How was he accepting this so blithely? It was like something out of a really stupid straight-to-video movie. Lies.
His confusion was overruled by an explosion.
Harry knew explosions. Between training and his actual job, he'd seen more than most. Once he was done with trying to curl himself up in a ball and stuff himself into his own arsehole for safety, the words gas bottles going up popped into his mind. Whatever had gone on in that yard, it had burst a couple of dozen CO2 cylinders, all at once.
Which should - quick bit of mental arithmetic, not a detonation but there's a fair chunk of energy in those things - have blown down half the pub in all likelihood, and for a certainty the brick wall that was all that stood between him and the bang. He began feeling himself all over for fragment punctures, he'd been told that sometimes you didn't feel it for hours afterward, before looking up.
The wall had been blown down. It had just stopped falling. Frozen, canted about thirty degrees over, some of the bricks hovering in mid-air.
"The fuck -?" he breathed.
Suddenly there was a slim, feminine hand in his field of vision. Her again.
"Come with me if you want to live," she said.
"Well, if you put it like that," he said, wincing a bit at how shaky his voice sounded. He took the hand and let her pull him to his feet. Some strength in her, if Harry was any judge. He decided that some enemy-of-my-enemy thinking was the right way to go, here.
"Do we wait for the police or -" he was interrupted by a crash. As soon as she led him away from under the not-falling wall, it seemed to realise that gravity was a thing and collapsed to the ground. Straight down, rather than the topple it had been in the middle of.
A couple of bricks bounced out of the resulting heap, and Harry had to dance a bit to avoid being hit. The woman just stood still, and the force-field thing stopped anything hitting her.
"Who - what -?" Harry was not feeling at his best. Now things had gone quiet he was getting the crash.
"Explanations will have to wait. We need to be a long way from here very quickly. Emergency Services have been summoned. That building is on fire, and will collapse very soon. There will be more of the enemy arriving soon also. Come." She strode away to the dead-end of the alley. A quick gesture with her baton, and the wall just disassembled itself, the bricks floating free of the wall and away to either side to leave a passage through.
Harry stood gawping at it.
The woman, who'd been striding for the passage, stopped and turned to look at him. "There will be time for you to have an emotional reaction later. For now, you must remember that you are a soldier, and the enemy is coming to kill you. You do not have the means to fight them all. Please come quickly, I have a car parked nearby."
Harry recognised that she had a point. If nothing else, he'd killed at least one and possibly three of the black robes, which might make them sort of hasty with the explosions if they caught up with him. Meanwhile this woman, weird as she was - what was with the Mister Spock way of talking? And those eyes? - had saved his life at least once with whatever weirdness she was triggering with that baton.
If he wanted to get out of this alive - and so far, he was the only one he was certain had because probably-Janice had run back into danger - forward with the weird woman was the way out.
Harry stepped through the hole in the wall that she'd made, somehow - how had she known to set that up ahead of time? - without there being any visible mechanism. It was a cool effect, but he knew he didn't have time to get a close look and maybe take it apart to find out how it worked. As he got to the other side - the back yard of some other building, he turned to see the wall reassembling itself behind him.
When this is all over I'm coming back to find out how the trick was done, he promised himself. He didn't like illusionists. They were all about tricking the audience, and Harry hated tricks like that. They were sort of like lies, and he hated lies. He must not believe lies.
"This way," Weird Woman said, opening a fire exit that didn't have a handle or any kind of lock on the outside. It had the usual crash bars on the inside, so Harry guessed at some kind of fishing-line trick that he couldn't see in the low light. He was getting more and more impressed with her preparation for this, but that raised more questions than it answered.
Who were the black robe fuckers? How did that one know Harry's name? How did she know they'd be here, and that Harry would make an escape out the back? How did she know all this far enough in advance that she could prepare an escape route this well?
"How long before I get a full debrief off you?" He asked, following her through a series of what looked like the back rooms of shops. Shops that were apparently all interconnected in back: doors kept appearing as they made their way around mazes of shelving and piled-up shipping boxes.
"When we get to my car. I can answer some questions en route. I have a hotel room booked, and I can explain everything there. I can't use magical methods of transport, they are being tracked. I am taking a risk with the amount of magic I am using to break contact with the enemy."
"What methods of transport?" Harry hated that word. People kept using it, and he'd never been able to find out what it meant. It was some bit of slang that always made him feel excluded, and too embarrassed to straight-up ask anyone. He hated admitting that he'd forgotten anything.
"Magical."
"I don't know what that means," he said, feeling that he'd just have to fuckin' cope with the embarrassment.
She stopped, looked back at him. Her baton twitched in her hand. "It seems they really wanted to make sure with you. I will explain it another way. Have you seen Star Trek?"
"Yes?" Who hadn't, in this day and age? Harry liked sci-fi. Everything in it made sense. Science was truth, not lies, and he knew he must not believe lies. Harry added two more questions to his list, though. Who were they? And what had they tried to make sure of?
Weird woman carried on talking regardless of Harry's confusion. "I have access to something very much like the transporters from that programme. Use of it is denied to me because it is currently under surveillance by the enemy. The technology I have been using to help us escape is also under surveillance, but I judge the risk acceptable to get as far as the car. The car is not under surveillance, and the enemy will not expect us to use it."
Now that Harry could understand. "And I get some questions answered on the drive, and more when we get where we're going?" She'd better be telling the truth. Harry hated lies, and knew he must not believe lies.
"Correct." Harry had half-expected her to say 'affirmative'. The flat, unaffected voice was starting to get to him. She went on, "This next door leads outdoors, a short distance from where I parked the car. I have with me a liquid technology that will temporarily alter our appearances."
"How does that work?"
"You drink the liquid, and your appearance changes. The process is unpleasant, but safe. The flavour of the liquid is unpleasant, but bearable. The mechanism of action would take several hours to explain if you had the necessary qualifications to understand it, but you do not."
That was something Harry could grasp. He could explain how explosives worked, but wasn't sure he could dumb it down for anyone who didn't have A-levels in Chemistry and Physics.
"All this advanced technology, are you from outer space?" He grinned as he said it. He'd watched and read a lot of science fiction: some lines were just traditional.
Weird woman clearly understood that. She tilted her head, and said, "No, I'm from Oxford. I just work in outer space. I hope that convinces you that I know what I am doing? And that I, too, have seen Star Trek?"
"Let's see this liquid technology, then?"
She handed over a small bottle, the brown glass sort you got medicine in from the chemist. Even had a child-proof cap. It was lettered with a neat capital 'H' on the cap and on the side in marker pen, and from the sloshing sound was about half full. "I warn you again: the flavour is bad. It is easiest to bear if you drink it down in one. Do not try and sniff it first, that will only make it worse. I will drink first to reassure you."
She unscrewed the top of her bottle with a sharp click and upended the bottle into her mouth. Nothing happened for a second or two, and then her face seemed to bubble, melt and shift. The wig dropped off and was replaced with bushy afro hair, her skin darkened a couple of shades and her features broadened. She now had the appearance of a very pretty black girl of roughly the same height and build.
"Whoah," was all Harry could say, "Do you have to stay roughly the same size?"
"No. The assumed form has to be human, that is the only restriction. I selected target forms that matched our clothes sizes."
Harry nodded. That made sense. "So when I drink this I turn into a bloke who looks nothing like me but has the same inside leg measurement?"
"Correct. Please drink now. We have very little time left to successfully break contact."
Harry imitated Weird Woman and knocked the stuff in the bottle back in one go. She was right, it tasted like arse. Not pert, cute, perfumed girl arse, either. Harry knew what the inside of his army-issue shreddies smelt like after a week on exercise, and this was worse. After the flavour came the sensations. Churning in his guts like a bad kebab on top of eight pints, a hot flush like he'd been dipped in boiling water, and a melting sensation he couldn't put words to. It all made him screw his eyes tight shut and hunch over a bit, fighting the urge to puke.
It subsided as quickly as it started, and when he opened his eyes he saw that his hands were now black, with pale palms. "I'm guessing I don't answer to my old description any more?" he said. Weird woman was right, he still fit in his clothes. He could probably stand to loosen his belt a notch, maybe.
"Correct. I will perform one more piece of technology."
She waved the baton and suddenly his trousers fit perfectly. The colours of everything he was wearing changed, and the blood from pasty-face dried up and puffed away. Another wave, and her own clothing changed colour and style.
He found himself torn between being amazed and feelings of superstitious dread. He didn't know where that came from: he was all about the science, even if he wasn't bright enough to be very good at it, and superstition could go pee up a rope. Superstition was basically lies, and he knew he must not believe lies. He quashed the uneasy feeling: this was just science he didn't understand. Probably some of that nanotechnology that New Scientist kept getting excited about.
The car turned out to be a fairly anonymous old blue Rover 400, which Weird Woman asked him to drive. "In the event of further combat, you have superior driving skills and I am better equipped to fight the enemy."
She directed him to get out of town without attracting attention and take whatever route seemed best to the M40 northbound.
Once he'd hit the A34 toward Oxford, which carried on to join the M40 just past the city, he asked "So who are you, who were those wankers in the black robes, and why did one of them know my name?" He suspected questions about the 'technology' would have to wait. They were the kind of questions that promised whiteboards and power-point slides.
"I am unable to say my real name for reasons I will explain later. I am a friend, someone you knew as a child but have been made to forget. The w- individuals in the black robes are enemy soldiers in a war that is being fought in secret. Your birth parents fought in that war and died when you were very small. It is difficult to explain more, as the process of making you forget things also included the use of brainwashing technology that renders you unable to understand any explanation I might give."
Harry felt a shudder of dread go through him. There were horror stories of what sometimes happened if you got taken prisoner by the wrong group. You came back a true believer in their cause, or worse, a sleeper agent. Harry had watched The Manchurian Candidate a couple of years previously and been unable to sleep well for weeks afterward. The whole idea gave him the piss shivers.
It was also complete and obvious bollocks. He knew that lots of people lied, and that he must not believe lies. Things like that happened in bad propaganda and scary movies, not in real life. He decided to play along, though. Weird woman was armed, for all he didn't understand the nature of the weapon. "Why was this done to me?"
"Again, you are under conditioning that would prevent you from understanding the answer. I do not wish you to try and fight the conditioning while you are driving. That would cause an accident. When we get where we are going, I have technology that can remove some of the conditioning, although the memory alterations you suffered at fifteen are now permanent. They re-wrote four years of your life from shortly before your eleventh birthday to shortly after your fifteenth, and constructed a fake life for you away from your old one with compulsions to avoid returning to your roots. In the early years, contact with familiar places and people might have been a method whereby the memory alterations could have been undone."
Fifteen was the age at which he'd been moved away from Little Whingeing by social services, who'd been called in by the teachers at Stonewall High after he lost it and hospitalised another pupil. He'd been put with foster-carers in Crawley, who'd been warned he was troubled. It turned out that Richard and Terri were exactly what he needed to recover from growing up with the Dursleys.
He'd discovered that without the Dursleys and their bullshit, he was actually a fairly sensible, smart kid, able to catch up in only a year from years of not being allowed to do homework, get six As and 3 Bs at GCSE only a year later than his contemporaries, and bag four As by way of A-Levels at the local Sixth Form College. Richard and Terri had been trying to encourage him to go to university, but he wanted to get away and the Army looked like the best bet for that. To this day he couldn't say where that idea had come from.
If Weird Woman was spinning him a line, she'd researched it to fit with his life very well. He found himself having to choke down an angry denial that he had ever forgotten anything. He could see his knuckles paling as he gripped the steering wheel. This was worse than his usual embarrassment over not having a perfect memory - itself a bit eccentric. He wanted to yell, scream, throw punches. Hurt anyone who suggested he'd forgotten anything, and that wasn't natural. Was this what brainwashing felt like?
He didn't like getting angry. Getting angry had nearly got him put in jail at fifteen - the suspended youth custody order had delayed him joining the army. He'd had to wait until it was spent. Richard and Terri - mostly Richard, Terri was way more pacifist than her husband - had signed him up for Tai Chi to start with in the hopes of teaching him some self-control and inner peace, and the meditation exercises helped. He focussed on the road and calmed himself down.
"Assuming you've told the truth," he said, ignoring the little internal voice that insisted she was a liar, that he must not believe lies, "one of those black robes knew my name. Why was that?"
"Describe him."
"White, really white, pasty-pale with platinum blonde hair, shoulder length. Narrow face, weak chin, pale blue eyes. Thin blonde moustache, bit darker than the hair." Sort of face that screams 'Rupert' at you, really. Just remembering it gave Harry cause to clench harder on the steering wheel.
"Your description matches Draco Malfoy, another individual you knew before your memory was altered. He is the son of senior enemy personnel."
"Oh. I'm pretty sure I killed him. Stabbed him in the gut. Broken bottle to the throat." Harry still didn't feel anything in particular about that other than a sense of satisfaction, which baffled him.
Long silence. "You may well have. The technology we use includes advanced healing, but if you severed an important blood vessel in the neck he might not have been got to medical assistance quickly enough. How do you feel about that?"
"The sight of him made me, I dunno, berzerk, I think. His mates had just killed a couple of kids, and I was already pretty angry, but him in particular? I saw red just looking at his face."
"You and he were antagonistic during the whole time you knew each other. It may be that during the procedure to alter your memories, he visited to gloat. That would account for your emotional response. You cannot recall the reason, so it seems irrational."
"Sounds like a charming character."
"Your sarcastic idiom is appropriate. Shortly after you were taken away for memory modification, he and several of his associates took to harassing me for being one of your known friends. It reached the point of indecent assault. If I still had emotions, I suspect I would be pleased and grateful that you killed him."
There was nothing Harry could say to that, although again he was aware of the list of questions growing.
"We will need to stop the car shortly, and definitely within the next ten minutes. The change-of-appearance fluid will expire shortly, and it is unsafe to continue driving while the change wears off."
"I'll look for a lay-by. Where are we headed after that?"
"I have a hotel room booked at a service station on the M6, just after Junction 28. I prepared it earlier to defeat enemy surveillance."
AUTHOR NOTES
"Landlord" is the old-fashioned way of referring to the chap in charge of a pub. Either the owner or the leaseholder in chief - a lot of pubs were owned by breweries and rented out to someone who'd take the business risk of actually running the place - he's the one legally responsible for the place. Also referred to as the 'licensee', drinking establishments having been heavily regulated for a couple of centuries now. Anyone who's seen brits en masse with a skinful of drink down them will understand why this is the case.
CSM and SNCO - Company Sergeant Major and Senior Non-Commissioned Officer respectively. Incidentally, do not assume that any title of position or rank is uniform across the British Army. Some of the older regiments have all kinds of weird traditions dating back to when they were still Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army and fighting against the Royal Army. (And winning, which is why we don't have a Royal Army in the UK any more.)
"Last four" - last four digits of the service number. To make sure the soldier getting bollocked is the correct one.
The Royal Logistic Corps is the biggest unit in the British Army. It's a popular choice for those joining the army to get trade training. Those in the know will have spotted some things wrong with what we see of Harry's army career: I took some liberties to make things fit the way I wanted for story purposes. It's not like exceptions and dodges-around-regulations don't happen now and then.
Harry's thinking after beating those two guys to death was a bit scrambled: while the police and the CPS are known to make outrageous mistakes, they're not as bad as Harry's assuming.
Astute readers will note that there are some flaws in the story Harry tells of his move away from the Dursleys. Those flaws are there for a reason, don't honk about them in comments and reviews.
Returning to the author note at the start, there's also room in the Harry Potter Fanfic Phase Space for a Bill and Ted time travel story. Someone needs to get on that. If it has already been done, let me know in a comment/review, please.
Finally, and they're never going to read this, all the guys I knew at school who went into the forces because it was that or the dole and who are the only reason I know anything about HM Armed Forces at all? Cheers, lads. Those of you are still alive, at any rate.
Fanfic recommendation: Obviously, you might want to read Robst's You're My Density on FFN, as it set the idea for this story off and running. It's not his best work, though. The actual recommendation is Harry Potter and the Unexpected Mother by StruggleMuggle. Only on AO3 as far as I can tell. If, like me, you're a sucker for a well done Evil Dumbledore vs. OP Harry, you'll enjoy it. Plus, he writes well.