I do not own Harry Potter
Backstory to this fan continuation of a fanfiction
In this story, I am continuing Kathryn518's story called I'm Still Here. It is an excellent story, but it is unfinished, with its last chapter posted in early 2017. Kathryn last posted a story in April 2019. I am saying this not to belittle or complain, since writing is hard and time consuming, writer's block is real and painful, and since real life exists and writing stories you won't make money from is extremely hard to do if you ever stop enjoying it. While I do not know her or why the story has not updated myself, I do not think worse of her in any way for not writing more of this, or any story.
Anyway, a month or so ago, I started reading Harry Potter fanfiction because I needed new reading material and I didn't want to buy new books. I eventually read I'm Still Here. I was disappointed that it is unfinished, considering that it is one of the best ones I've read so far, and because it ended on a cliffhanger. My career ambition is to be a professional author, so when I got to the end of I'm Still Here, I thought to myself, 'why don't I finish it myself?' Two weeks later, I have the rest plotted out and chapter one ready to go.
The I'm Still Here plot before I started this
If you are new to this story, you should read it before you read this, but this is a fairly good refresher. I'm Still Here is a fanfiction that diverged around the end of Order of the Phoenix, where Voldemort went on the offensive, mostly with the aid of demons that he somehow summoned. He led to the destruction of almost everything in the wizarding world, including many parts of other countries. By that point in the war, Harry was 23 and alone in the world. However, Voldemort was almost alone too, and when he realized how unlikely it was that he would win, he used the Mirror of Erised to leave for another dimension. Harry followed him, and ended up in a world where a female version of him was the girl who lived, and where James and Lily lived through the war, with James' parents dying instead. Harry, back in the body he was in around the time of book five, meets up with the Flamels and earns their trust. They conspire to send Harry to Hogwarts to prevent Voldemort from using the Tournament of Champions to resurrect himself.
Zooming ahead in the plot as fast as possible now, Harry meets several unlikely allies in the Draco Malfoy from Harry's world, who had been a death eater before Voldemort killed him after a failed ambush, as well as Daphne Greengrass, who is one of the only people in the world who knows his secret other than the Flamels and Draco. Harry breaks Regulus out of Azkaban, studies dueling under Flitwick along with Fleur Delacour, is sorted into Slytherin and told to force it to be a respectable house, duels Barty Crouch and almost captures him before fighting Bellatrix off as well. Iris Potter is also a main character, and she goes through a lot as well, including being chosen to be a Triwizard Champion. (All of this happens out of the order I put it in, but its the gist of what happens.) The last chapter that was released at the time I am writing this is that Harry gets mad at trying to remain secret and unnoticed at Hogwarts, and decides to simply kill the dementors that had been sent to Hogwarts to guard against attacks from Bellatrix and other Death Eaters. He does so, being named Champion of Hogwarts by the sorting hat in the process, but as soon as he finishes killing them, he gets blasted backwards by the magical shockwave of killing them, he falls unconscious and the chapter ends. There are a bunch of other plot points and characters, so I will try to reintroduce things slowly for a bit.
Chapter 1
Daphne Greengrass sat down to eat after she left Harry and Draco and brought the Gryffindor girl to Madame Flamel and Professor Flitwick. Both had looked sick at how close she had come to being murdered by the dementors. For once Dumbledore wouldn't be the subject of their ire, considering that he had been against them going to Hogwarts. Daphne had been wondering at the implications of that on her way back. It was clear to her that the dementors would be gone in... twelve hours perhaps? It could be less, once Fudge realized that the only possible way to avoid being ousted from his place by the next election was to immediately side with the large number of powerful families that wanted the dementors gone. Of course, when she had left, Potter was looking murderous. If there was anyone who could singlehandedly throw the dementors out of Hogwarts, it would be Harry Potter, the man from another world, come to stop Voldemort.
Suddenly, as Daphne was putting a helping of eggs on her plate, she heard a loud, pained scream, one that carried with it a familiar sensation of pain and hopelessness, a sensation that dragged up her worst memories. She looked around the grand hall in amazement. What could make a dementor scream like that? She didn't need anyone to tell her that it was Harry Potter, somehow, and it wouldn't be the first impossible thing the man did.
Why couldn't he at least wait till she had finished her meal? She had only had time to dish out some food for herself and barely start on it when everyone in the hall heard the scream. She looked over at Domitius Sura, a weak willed, unimportant seventh year Slytherin. Still, he was one of the few seventh years that hadn't ended up frozen by the wards Harry had set up for trying to break into the younger student's rooms earlier in the year, and he hadn't ever been a bully. Daphne and he reacted almost simultaneously to the scream, and she just barely spoke before him, saying the first thing that came to her mind. "Potter!"
Domitius leaned back and looked around, scanning the room. "Can't be from her, she's still here." He looked back. "What do you think that was?"
Daphne cursed her slip of the tongue, but at least she could say that she had meant Iris Potter, not Harry. The man from another dimension. The Boy Who Lived. It still seemed inconceivable. But it was still true, somehow. "That scream couldn't possibly have been anything but a dementor, you heard it, but it seems like it was in pain. What could hurt a dementor? If it wasn't her then... Flamel's missing, it must have been him."
Daphne got up, muttering about how she had just left him. As she was walking, she realized just how much she was in over her head. Somehow, she had avoided thinking about it like this, but she was playing with people who could kill her in a second. Harry was directly fighting against one, possibly even two Voldemorts. Voldemort had summoned demons! Not one, not ten, hundreds! He had wrecked the magical world in its entirety! She had threatened Lord Harry James Potter Black Flamel. Even once she realized how powerful he was, she hadn't realized that he actually would have killed her, if he thought he should. His youthful appearance had made her think of him as another teen, when he was really twenty three. He had been fighting a war since he was seventeen, and through it had seen everyone he cared about die. Apparently, they were usually bad deaths, also usually in front of him. The thought of watching her sister Astoria die from a curse that liquefied her organs, like Harry had watched his last friend die... it was horrific
Her train of thought put her off balance. She was at the edge of the hall, turning the corner, when she ran straight into Draco Malfoy, who was obviously out of breath and shaken. Her annoyance made her lash out a bit at him. "Malfoy, watch where you're going, you undergrown prat! Where's Flamel, and what was that scream? What did he do that could hurt a dementor?"
Draco looked at Daphne. "That sound carried that far?
Suddenly what must have been a hundred screams sounded, and continued to shriek. Again the hopelessness, the despair. Draco winced, swayed, and only seemed to return to consciousness when Daphne shook him by the shoulder. Despite how much he was still sometimes an annoyance even after he and Harry had come from their dimension, Daphne felt too much pity to let him relive his memories. Compared to living as a ghost after your master murdered you in a temper tantrum while your parents watched and did nothing, her worst memory was like a casual stroll through the park.
"Thanks," he said. In the great hall, she saw most of the professors casting patronuses for the students. This time, she was able to tell where the sound was coming from, on the Hogwarts grounds. If they got to a window, they could see what was going on. They were fairly close to one, but their paths took them near other students. Seeing this, Malfoy continued quietly. "After Potter saved Natalie, he got a bit..."
Daphne supplied probable words. "Loopy? Intense? Depressed? Awesome?"
"All of them at once, I suppose. Anyway, he got this far off sort of look, said that he needed to destroy Voldemort's followers, and then he ordered me to leave and he said we should prevent anyone from interfering."
"How are we supposed to do that?" From the look on Malfoy's face, it was a question he had asked himself, likely starting as soon as he had left Potter. Daphne would have a lot to think about in the coming days, including about Harry being too impetuous, but for now, she needed to focus.
Draco looked around. "It looks like the professors aren't going to move, they're protecting the students from all the dementors, but it'll be bad if they call the aurors - Merlin's beard, how is that idiot going to survive this one?"
Daphne bent back to look out the window at the same angle as him, and gasped at the sight. It wasn't just a few dementors, it was all of them. It had to be. Someone else near them saw it and shouted the news out. In the great hall, there were murmurs, shouts, and she distinctly heard Sirius Black yelling into the two way mirror he still had for auror reinforcements to come. Suddenly a sonorous boosted shout rang through the air, courtesy of Mcgonnogal. "Everyone, stay in the hall until the aurors come! This is a matter for them and it is the responsibility of our staff to ensure the safety of our students!"
Suddenly, James shouted. "There's a student down there!" Without waiting further, he dashed toward the exit Draco and Daphne were at, and he was joined by Sirius and Frank Longbottom.
"What do we do? What do we do?" Draco was panicking, like most people would do when stuck between Harry Potter and the three most effective aurors currently working.
"How should I know? They're aurors, we can't do anything to stop them, let's just go with them." She had barely finished when James Potter came running through. He was opening his mouth to shout at them when Daphne said "We need to go with you, it's our friend out there. We can even cast our patronuses! We can help!"
He slowed, then looked at Sirius appraisingly. Daphne's possibly soon-to-be father had a pained look on his face. "Daphne, dear, your mother -"
"Sirius, we can't stand around and argue." James was insistent, and she knew she had to appeal to the belief in the power of friendship and irresponsibility that Sirius held.
"He's right, and we won't get in your way, sir, but we need to help Ares, sir. We won't take no for an answer."
He gave her a look that said that he would have an uncomfortable talk about it with her. Later. He started sprinting down the corridor. "If you can keep up, you can help us, but don't follow us if you fall behind!"
Daphne had casted her patronus before he was half done, and she and Draco were running down after the aurors before he finished speaking. Harry was right, the way he taught was far better, and she was able to run beside it, throwing aside and ignoring the dementors' effects as she ran with the others.
She was very winded by the time they got out of Hogwarts, and she saw the spectacle of the hundreds of dementors surrounding Potter, his thestral patronus standing beside him. He stood tall, stabbing a dementor with a sword he had probably gotten from his enormous trunk. It was amazing, but she barely saw it before the dementors all dissolved into mist, shouting one last time before they all seemed to die. Their effects disappeared instantly. He had killed them all. He killed dementors. To everyone, they were considered immortal. Most people thought that they would continue forever, even after the earth and all life in it failed. Perhaps one day she would stop being flabbergasted by what he could do.
The exit of the dementors left a shockwave through the air, knocking Daphne down and knocking the rest back. Well, she was both the lightest and the least fit of them all. Who would have thought it in a million years, Draco Malfoy, working out? She decided to head to Harry and ask him to let her exercise with them as soon as - she suddenly saw Harry flying through the air away from them, toward the forest.
Draco was the first to recover, not even looking at the remains of the dementors floating to the ground as he ran toward where Harry had been thrown, "Harry!".
Daphne jumped up, and passed the dumbfounded aurors from where they looked at the impossibility. It was only after she passed them that they followed.
Even if they hadn't seen where he had flown and crashed, they would have had a trail to follow, an ornate sword and the... was that the sorting hat? As she passed it she realized it was, and it was somehow undamaged. It even shouted at them, ordering them to protect the Hogwarts champion? What? She didn't even flinch as she dashed past it. It seemed that you could only withstand so much shock before not registering it anymore.
Draco and she were the first people to get to him, and it was obvious he was hurt, hurt badly. Still, he was clearly breathing, and had no injuries that looked immediately life threatening. Upon closer inspection however, he seemed better than she had initially thought. His face was messed up, his forehead was bleeding badly, his hand seemed frozen, and he generally looked hurt, vulnerable in a way he never had, except for his extended stay in the infirmary after he destroyed Bellatrix's fiendfyre.
James Potter wasted no more time gawking by the time he got to them. He focused his wand on Harry, and cast a spell that visibly revealed some sort of dark residue around Harry's face, though Daphne could not tell what it meant. "He'll be fine, I think, miss Greengrass, but we need to get him out of here. He seems to have suffered large amounts of magical mental influence from the dementors dying. It seems... I have far too little knowledge here, but it feels like the same magical signature as the dementors leave when they are near people, just extremely magnified. Again, if I had to guess, he'll be fine soon, but we need to get him to his mother in the infirmary."
He spoke a few diagnostic spells for physical damage, and then a couple of healing spells, then lifted him up on a magical stretcher. Daphne would have stopped him from casting any sort of spell on Harry for James's own safety, but Perennel Flamel had made it clear to him and a collection of the Hogwarts staff what spells they could and could not cast on him, and had declared that he wasn't interested in talking about his "safety measures." She had gotten away with helping an apparently underage student have spells on his gear and body that could maim or incapacitate people by talking about how Harry was the Flamel's heir and son. She had threatened anyone who hurt 'Ares', and people accepted her explanation. That was another incredible thing Harry had done. He had, in a week, gotten the trust of The Immortal Alchemist and his wife and gotten them to protect him and even declare him their heir. It probably would never get that far, people didn't call Nicholas Flamel "The Immortal Alchemist" because he was good at dying, but it was still the thought that counted.
Now that he had no blood over his face, she could see that Harry had a tortured expression on his face. James too saw it, and cast an innervate on him, trying to get him to wake up. It failed, but it seemed to draw him awake enough that he gasped and started breathing faster. James looked directly at her and Draco. "Do you have any idea why he killed those dementors? Or for that matter, how he killed them?"
Draco looked at her. At her shrug, he spoke haltingly. "Well... auror Potter... Flamel's owl came to us as we were sitting down for our meal. It pecked at him, and he knew it was trying to lead him somewhere, he's very close to it. We left, and we went to the owlery. We saw a dementor attacking a student, Natalie MacDonald, a first year Gryffindor. He cast the patronus, saved her, and told Daphne and I to go to the infirmary with her. We did, and by the time I got to the hall, we heard the first scream."
"Is that everything, Mr. Malfoy?"
"Almost, sir. He seemed angry that the dementor had almost killed a student, he seemed to blame Minister Fudge for it." Draco's explanation was actually not bad. He hadn't lied much, and had hidden as much as could be hidden knowing that there was no possible way that they wouldn't know he had killed them.
Daphne looked up. By now, a few aurors were spilling out of Hogwarts, Amelia Bones and Alastor Moody at their head. As she was distracted, Harry began sleep talking, speaking in a tortured near-whisper. "Cedric, don't grab the cup! Don't die... mum, dad, Quirrel, Cedric, Sirius, Remus, Tonks, Bill, Ron, Fred, George, Percy, Ginny, Hermione! I killed them all... don't die for me... everything... everyone... all dead, all dead. Gone. I'm sorry."
Daphne felt a surge of despair as she heard him start speaking. She had known from the start she wouldn't be able to use a silencing spell on him, or get him to stop. She wasn't able to cast soundlessly, and Sirius was near enough to hear all that she said. Beyond that, they would know that he had been silenced, dispel it instantly, and possibly arrest and question her to see if she was covering something up. So, like the aurors and Draco, she simply listened as Harry spoke what he had certainly been shown by the dementors. She looked at Draco, who attempted to interrupt Harry's words. "Mr. Potter-" Malfoy was cut off by James's glare. When Harry finished, Daphne cut in immediately, trying to get them to recover. There was no way the aurors would not know that Harry's delirious statements, made immediately after unprecedented exposure to creatures that brought up a person's worst memories, were actually Harry's worst memories. Still, she would try and help. Somehow.
"Do any of you have a sleep potion? He's obviously delirious, he needs sleep and Madame Flamel's help, immediately!"
Sirius looked at her, deathly serious and more than a little disturbed. "Daphne, Mr. Malfoy, if you have any idea what he was talking about, I would encourage you to speak up, immediately!" Well, even if Harry hadn't called people by their last names, Harry had said the first names of Sirius, his best friend Remus Lupin, and one of his only relatives he hadn't disowned.
This time, it was Draco that spoke up for Harry. "You can ask him yourself, but we need to get him safe first, and we need you to promise to not speak of what he said to anyone." He was staring at James, then at Sirius and Frank with desperation and pleading written all over his face.
"Please, just keep what he said to yourselves, just until you can ask him yourself, and afterwards spread whatever you want about it around." Daphne finished her plea in a near whisper, because of how close Amelia Bones' group was.
The three looked around and nodded, making a snap decision. "Not a word to anyone, you have our promises." He cast a silencio and a petrificus totalus on Harry as Frank and he went to talk to their leader. Draco and Daphne relaxed. The secret was out, and there wasn't anything they could do about it, but at least it was controlled and contained... as much as possible.
That's chapter one of what I have. Kathryn does enormous chapters, but I generally do much shorter ones. I will try to release another short chapter later tomorrow or Wednesday, but after that I will lengthen them a lot. I am a fairly new writer, so any critiques of my writing are welcome. In fact, half the reason I'm doing this is because it seems like a great way to get suggestions from people who are outside my family and friends group.
