Standard Warning: I do not own JKR, X-Men, MCU, or anything that may crop up occasionally in this fanfic.
'Well, that was a bust. Should have expected it though… I mean really who would give up a real immortality rock for a year when they need it day in and day out just to live? It's probably somewhere like Prince of Slytherin said it'd be: in his sock drawer under a fidelius.'
I toss the red glass bauble up like a baseball and subsequently rewrap it in the paper bag, and really that should have been my first clue. Who on Earth would request a high-security Gringotts vault for a single object and then have the gall to put the object they wanted to protect in a paper sack? It's Nick friggin Flammel's immortality rock for Merlin's sake! If he wanted it covered up he would have used something like mokeskin, or acromantula silk, hell! Even a leather bag would have been better than the muggle paper sack in my hand.
I sigh and thunder (yes, that's what I'm calling it now. If phoenixes flash, elves pop, and humans apparate then I can say Thunderbirds thunder) from the small muggle park I'm hunkered down in back to Gringotts, redepositing the fake Stone where it was firmly nestled before. Well, now I'm out of things to do. Since all the Horcruxes are in striking distance, Vernon's dead, and I'm in no position to get Pettigrew, my list isn't quite ready to be finished. What to do, what to do?
Speaking of Horcruxes, hiding, and protection… why did Voldemort store parts of his soul in lame ass places? The Ring, I get it, I do. He was sixteen and sort of panicking, which is never good for rational thought while the Diadem was in a school full of people who could have found it in fifty years. The last three though? I can respect those. The Diary was hidden under the Malfoy Manor's war wards and would have been perfectly safe if it weren't for a series of unfortunate events on Lucy's part. The Cup would have been perfectly safe if Bellatrix had realized the Goblins hate people living in their vaults without paying rent, and that's effectively what the horcrux did.
But the Locket? That's a damn near masterpiece of a wild goose chase followed by the wizarding edition of Fort Knox. You would have to know Tom Riddle from when he was a child, pray he didn't kill you for it before, hopefully, a wizard would find you hunting for that specific information, then that wizard would have to swim through ice-cold water without warming charms, give up some blood to a wall, find a boat in a lake full of zombies, drink a potion from Al Capone's wet dreams, then make it out of there without the Zombies dragging you under whatever that nightmare fuel is, swim out of that hellhole with a locket that will drag you to Davy Jones locker, and then (if you somehow survive all that) you have to find a way to destroy something with only three known vulnerabilities. One being incedibly destructive fire that is so damned near uncontrollable you may kill yourself trying, another is the killing curse, and the last is basilisk venom.
'Maybe I'll hatch one of those for myself one day… nah. But I do need to go see about getting some things from Knockturn Alley, days like this are when I wish my animagus form wasn't a Thunderbird -'
"I resent that, fledgling," an ancient voice rings through my head and I stop short, nearly falling on my face as the voice within chuckles at me.
'Stormfront?'
"Aye, fledgling. That is your name for me, my true name is unsuited to this language."
'This is quite interesting…'
"Yes, I believe it is a first for wizardkind. Never before has one truly harnessed the true spirit of the Sky Kings."
'Probably but then again it was Moira who brought us together.'
"You are indeed correct, fledgling. Shall we leave this place? We have much to discuss."
We thundered away and in a deep recess of my mind, I wonder how I managed to get myself into this situation.
Much Later…
A day of hopping the British Isles, sightseeing for me and analysis for Storm (we came to an agreement where he is Storm and our form is Stormfront… keeps our head straight), we eventually flew over where Hogwarts Castle should roughly be. Weathermen were very confused as to the storms that just appeared randomly over the isles, they were particularly interested in the storm that appeared over apparently nothing in Scotland.
But eventually, all good things must end. Around nine o'clock that evening, I thundered away to muggle London with my ski mask and black put gear firmly in place. I ripped open an ATM with my claws, looted the money and ran for an alley. I thundered away to Edinburgh and found a map of Scotland searching for the most remote place I can possibly find.
Thunder rings across another alley leaving nothing behind a young boy as he disappears into a small clearing in Pressmennan Wood. I pitch my tent and roll out my thick sleeping bag. I let my eyes fall shut, the nylon canopy overhead swaying slightly as a pair of whispers ghost through my head with *We're so sorry…* and my vision turns black.
I open my eyes to the gates of hell. And it's named Wool's Orphanage.
The next hours of my life are a record of hellacious torture, violence, debauchery, magic, might, insanity, pain, suffering, death, the unnatural…
I watched as Tom was beaten day after day until his magic started to show. I watched as he was choked unconscious and beaten to a bloody pulp only to be fine the next day when his magic did manifest. I watched him get raped by a priest in a confession, I saw his pain, his suffering, his life of hell finally snap when he learned to harness his accidental magic. Those who hurt him were hurt in turn, those who stole from him lost something dear. I watched as he dragged the boy who beat him within an inch of his life and his best friend, and possible lover, down to that awful cave.
Two years later, everyone went out of their way to avoid the 'devil-spawn,' except for the day a strange redheaded man came and talked to Tom, he told him that his powers, and everything else that he couldn't explain, were true magic. Albus Dumbledore had come to collect Tom, this was the closest I had ever seen to happiness in the broken boy. A chance to restart his horrible life.
His chance for a path to greatness was immediately extinguished by his placement in Slytherin. At the time, a man by the name of Gellert Grindelwald was making waves in Germany with a man named Adolf Hitler at his side. While Hitler aimed to cleanse the country of those who weren't Aryan, Grindelwald wanted to purge all who weren't magical. One of his most extreme followers, a man by the name Abelard Thorne, had advocated for the elimination of those who weren't of magical birth.
Tom Marvolo Riddle became the whipping boy of Slytherin until his fourth year. For four years the "mudblood" was beaten by his peers in the common room for their own sick entertainment, some of the older boys forcing him to relieve his own worst nightmares of that day with the priest between their exams and time for the train to leave. Until one day, one Slytherin who had failed a charms examination beat the fourth year into a bleeding heap. A Ravenclaw girl found him and pulled him into the nearest bathroom and nursed him back to health, they became close friends eventually a brief stint as lovers.
Their meeting place was that bathroom, by a streak of extreme luck Tom Riddle had finally decided to show his best friend why the Slytherins hated him.
He said, "$this is why I'm an outcast, why I only open myself to you.$"
His last word caused the door to slide open from some odd quirk of parseltongue. The rumbling behind him exposed the chamber of secrets to the world for the first time since the time of Salazar Slytherin. The girl looked down the shaft only for Tom to hiss "$close$," before raising his wand and casting one of his already favored spells, "legilimens."
With a surgeon's precision, he cut out the memory of what happened that afternoon. Later that day, Tom went down the ancient chamber of Salazar Slytherin, where he learned his true ancestry. In a hidden room, Tom Riddle found the self-updating tapestry that Salazar's wife knit herself. The idea was lost and the spell work was incredibly complex, what history did not know is that Salazar sang parselmagic into the fabric while his wife worked, as stated in the journals of Salazar Slytherin.
Tom did not consider that fact important nor did he care about the fact that his sister was raped and beaten by the Christians that came to Britain, that Salazar could only watch helplessly until they finally slit her throat in front of him. His first fit of accidental magic was to avenge his sister, and ever since that day he was staunchly opposed to the 'mudbloods.'
In the journal written near the end of his life, Salazar claimed that his son, Rodricar, coined the term mudblood for those of Christian descent, Salazar himself recorded the statement "if man came from dirt then how can man have blood? If man is returned to dirt would a man's blood not become mud? Then, if these Barbarians are correct, would men not have mud for blood?"
Tom Riddle found all those entries but did not seem to care but the thing he did care about would tear the wizarding world apart. He found his own name, the name of his mother and the name of his father at the bottom of the tapestry, the Tomes of Ekrizdis the Dark, and, most damningly for the world, he found the Journal of Herpo the Foul with notes written by Salazar himself. When he found his name on the tapestry he renamed himself because the name of a muggle was not worthy of a descendent of the great Salazar Slytherin.
'Ekrizdis… Ekrizdis... Who the fuck is Ekrizdis and why is his name familiar?'
For two years this continued on until the fateful day Prefect Tom Riddle walked out of the Chamber only for the hiss of a giant serpent to call out to him. The basilisk accepted Tom as her new master, if only she had killed the newly christened Lord Voldemort when they had first met those years ago. Instead, Tom opened the chamber one day for his pet to come out of the sink as his oldest friend, Myrtle Warren, burst out of a stall.
Tom was horrified when his life's anchor fell to the ground in a lifeless heap. His soul shattered that day, he turned on his heel and went down to the chamber's ritual room with his diary full of his accomplishments and memories with Myrtle written down with the most care he'd ever shown anything. With tears of anger streaming down his face, Tom entered Ekrizdis' ritual chamber.
With the circle completed, Tom started chanting in a language I wish I couldn't understand. He placed the innocent-looking diary in the center of the circles. With a push and pull motion at his stomach, Tom screamed an absolutely guttural scream of someone who should be dying.
I want to look away but I just can't. The next years crept by as Tom raped, tortured, and obliviated his way through Hogwarts after the bastard made that first Horcrux. Time only seemed to crawl slower as I watched every misadventure, every misdeed the fledgling dark lord made. I watched him work in Borgin and Burkes, I saw his expeditions of Greece, South America, China, Japan, and wherever he heard whispers of dark magic. When Tom decided the time was right, he returned to the country he hated with a vendetta and a violently burning rage. He burned his orphanage down in a demonic gout of fiendfyre while bringing together his merry band of brigands under the banner of the 'Knights of Walpurgis.'
These knights committed felony after felony, atrocity after atrocity through Britain until one brave reporter named the group the 'Death Eaters' for the acts of one Marcus Travers. The sick bastard killed his victims and butchered them, he liked to tie their families down as he ate the victims while they raged at him to stop. If his victim had daughters… well, to say their fate would be so much worse would be an understatement. The aurors actually managed to catch him in the act of raiding the wine cellar of his most recent victim's home while the homeowner was baking, literally, and managed to take him out but not without heavy casualties to their cause. Voldemort actually encouraged the name and made it official when he realized that the people were even more terrified that they would be killed and eaten by the newly minted Death Eaters and their boogeyman leader the Lord Voldemort… sheep are so much easier to slay when afraid after all.
This continued for years and years until Severus Snape knelt before the Dark Lord and I knew the end was nigh. The night Peter Pettigrew came in, his fate was sealed.
A year later Tom Riddle calmly walked into the Potter cottage, with James Potter nowhere to be seen, 'what happened to him?' Tom struts up the stairs and finds a heavily warded door. My jaw falls to the ground as the Dark Lord actually starts to growl in concentration. It takes twenty minutes for the wards on the door to finally fall while the Dark Lord's own hold true.
"STAY AWAY FROM THEM!" A familiar voice roars out of the darkness, a jet of golden light following not far behind. 'Them?'
Tom dodges with a snarl and says "back away you stupid girl! You have been promised to another!"
"Let them live! Kill me instead but let my babies live!" 'Oh… bloody, blithering, blustering fuck. Canon just got fucked out the window, things are looking a whole hell of a lot worse than a few hours ago.'
"So be it! Avada Kedavra!"
A flash of green light drops the gorgeous redhead like a stone. Tom walks over to the cribs but I'm already there looking with a dropped jaw at the raven-haired, green-eyed boy in the left while there's another boy in the cradle on the left. Redheaded and hazel-eyed while he's screaming and raging at the world while Harry stares at the visage of horror in front of him with a frown on his face. Tom raises his wand,
"Hadrian James Potter, Johnathan Orion Potter… Sons of James Potter and Lily Evans, for me to live one of you must die… Let it not be said that Lord Voldemort is without mercy, you shall both have a quick death," he takes a leather strap out of his back pocket and I feel my stomach drop when I see him start to draw smooth circles on the hardwood floor in chalk while he chants in Greek and Latin. He aims his wand at Harry after placing the leather bracelet with the symbol of a lion on the front. With a whispered, almost gentle, "Avada Kedavra," the lethal green light races toward Harry Potter. A silver shield is thrown up from around Harry's crib as a golden light is raised around John's.
The Dark Lord's eyes widened in fascinated horror as a lightning blue light rose from Harry's eyes to surround the boy. Storm has been defending this boy since day one, isn't that interesting…
The green bolt slammed into the newly raised shield, the shield fractured like an eggshell as a sliver of green energy touched the boy's forehead while the rest impacted the Dark Lord. The lightning blasting off of the shield shreds the Dark Lord's body like confetti. Harry screams as a wisp of black smoke enters his forehead and the Dark Lord screams as his body was blasted away. John catches a bit of metal to the forehead creating a small capital lambda on the left side of his forehead.
A crash sounds from downstairs as James Potter crashes into the room, running over to his sons. 'Why am I seeing this?' He picks up John with hot tears running down his face, trying to soothe the screaming infant. He sets a now sleeping John back in his cradle, he never noticed the rat in the corner that changed into one of his best friends in a split second or the red light from the silent stunner that slammed into his back.
Peter levitated the stunned James Potter to where his face was up. Pettigrew pulled a potion out of his robe, popped the stopper, and tilted the bottle back down James' throat. 'What the hell is that?'
"Sorry, Prongs, it's only business. Obliviate," 'this can't be real… even here it looks like Sirius got tossed into Azkaban but this time with the help of James Potter… strange…' "You will think that Sirius Black was your secret keeper, you will take Sirius black to the Aurors yourself and claim he betrayed you to the Dark Lord. When you see him, you will stun him and do as told."
My jaw falls open as Peter transforms into his rat form after taking the Dark Lord's wand, and not a second too soon. Sirius burst into the room at full speed, falling to his knees beside James. I growl when he ennerverates James only to catch a fist to the nose and a stunner to the chest.
Reality fades until I see the ceiling of my tent swaying above me. My resolve hardens and I thunder away immediately. I dematerialize in a small, dank cell that reeks of raw sewage, sea water, and rotting flesh.
"Padfoot, get up. It's time to get you out of this hellhole," I kick the pile of rags in the corner as a mangy looking mutt looks up at me. I smile while crouching down to scratch behind his ears, "hey, Padfoot, I know what happened. I know everything that happened," I close my eyes and focus on the memory of Halloween 1981, I pull the strand from my head and place it onto Sirius's forehead. He transforms back to human and looks at me with rage across his face before he can say anything I cut him off with, "We can discuss this after we are a long, long way away from this hellhole." I take his shoulder and thunder away from the place.
We reappear at my tent as Sirius looks around the woods in his doggy form with awe in his eyes. Reality warps around the dog leaving a corpse with too long hair, an awed face and bright eyes standing there.
"Pup is that really you?"
"Yes, it's me Padfo-OPH" I can't finish my sentence as I'm tackled by the man who tries to pick me up once and can't even get me off my feet.
"Siri, maybe you shouldn't try that until you get your strength back?"
"Yeah… yeah that's a good idea…" with a smirk we disappear from the forest with my tent in tow.
We reappear in Grimmauld Place followed by a clap of thunder followed by the pop of a house elf apparition.
"Bad master Black has returned with the goodest master Potter, what can Kreacher do for the masters?"
Sirius watches the exchange with shock plain across his face, obviously the revelations of today only served to promptly expedite his trip to his face.
I look down at my comatose godfather and shake my head slowly, "and he was doing so well… Kreacher, bring me a towel, a bag of ice and ask… actually take me to the tapestry, there's something I need to see."
"Yes, master Potter, right this way." I flip Sirius over and follow Kreature. We enter the tapestry room, I trace my finger along one of the burnt off spots and see the name 'Andromeda.'
"Tell me about Andromeda…" I whisper about one of the least characterized characters in canon.
"Missy Andy was burnt off the tapestry by great Mistress Walburga for marrying that filthy mudblood Tonkses, she's a healer at St. Mungy's. She's the head healer," he says with a sneer.
"Go to her," he actually looks to be in pain, I raise my hands in a gesture of peace, "Sirius needs a healer, she's literally the best there is Kreacher. Blood above all, correct?"
"Yes… master Potter."
"Thank you, find out when her shift is over and tell her that Lord Black requests her presence at her convenience," I tell the elf with a small smirk, the elf's eyes narrow but widen in realization.
"Missy Andy would refuse you, she can't turn down her head of house… Master Potter is the most cleverest wizard in Britain!" His eyes widen in manic glee.
"I only have one wish," his ears droop slightly, "please, please do not call Andromeda a blood traitor and do not call Ted Tonks a mudblood, please use the term muggleborn to his and her face. In private, however, feel free to speak as you wish. An angry healer is a healer that makes rash decisions and we do not need that. Do you understand?"
"Yes, master Potter," his eyes are wide with comprehension before he pops away.
I walk back to the kitchen and pick up the still unconscious Sirius Black with no small bit of effort. I put him down on the couch with an oof, the towel and a bag of ice appearing on the coffee table.
I look at the downed body of my Godfather, shaking my head as I wonder just what the hell I'm going to fucking do.
There are still some similarities to canon but most of this makes me wonder if this was really what the Harry Potter universe was really supposed to be like or if this is a new reality entirely, guess I'll never know and that's perfectly fine. When I meet Ron, I'll finally be able to prove Siri's- wait… Pettigrew was never hunted here. He won't be with the Weasleys, he'd be a free man… If that's the case then where in the seven hells is that rat hiding!?
Unknown Place…
In a spacious bedroom in a well furnished manor, a stout, yet rather well muscled, man woke up screaming from some unknown terror from far away. He stood up and ran for the ensuite bathroom, voiding the contents of his stomach from a late night in muggle London.
"Peter?" a matronly woman called out from the bed to her lover, "Peter, what's wrong?" She stood up in all her glory, her breasts bouncing in the early morning light as the results of their lovemaking last night trickled down her leg.
With a shaky breath, Peter stood up with a wan smile, "it's nothing, darling, go back to bed. I'll join you shortly," the man gives her body an appreciative once over before turning to the sink. Glancing up at the mirror, Peter briefly wondered if what he saw was true… if it was then a storm was coming, in the far more likely case that this is all just a figment of his imagination then he would be fine.
Peter smirked as he slowly convinced himself it was truly nothing. Moments later, Peter rejoined the woman that was once the fiance of Sirius Orion Black, aligning and plunging himself into her with a grunt from him and soft moan from her. Slowly, he let her body sooth him of his worries as the memory of the dream greyed with their pleasure and was forgotten with the peace of sleep.
