Summary: A suicide mission manages to win the war for a twenty-year-old Harry Potter, even if he does die in the attempt. For some reason though, he doesn't seem as dead as he should be – and the world he's woken up in has more than enough of its own problems.
Warnings: Violence, excessive amounts pf bad language, abuse of the Latin language and overuse of OCs.
Disclaimer: Anything you recognise isn't mine. Anything you don't is mine. On that note – I'm willing to let you use any of my characters if you ask and have back stories for quite a few, if anyone's bored and looking to write anything about an OC. -charming smile-
Author's Note: New Chapter One is up – taking quite a diversion from the old one, although you may recognise some elements. Still looking for a beta. Reviews and/or constructive criticismis much appreciated.
Chapter One: Headfirst into Hel
Dedicated to 'Spair. Sorry this isn't quite your 6,666 words – I'll do my best with the next chapter.
It was cold, when Harry began to move; so cold, that it felt like his bones were aching, freezing inside of him as he trembled unconsciously. Maybe the wizards were right, he thought. Maybe this was their Hel, cold enough to make a grown man cry, where the serpent Nithog chewed on the roots of Yggdrasil – and Harry slowly opened his eyes, moved his limbs from the awkward position they had fallen in. There was something wrong here, but it was more of a nagging feeling than any knowledge of the matter.
He pushed himself up, hands scrabbling against hard-packed ground, and shivered as he saw the snow that lay thickly scattered, not two metres away – strange, that where he was standing was the only patch of ground without a covering of snow. He finally got up, swaying slightly, uncertainly, and he could feel his feet scrape across dirt, bare and dirty. No shoes – someone wasn't too happy with him, he thought wryly, and a shudder wracked his body as the wind picked up, piercing through the threadbare robes he wore with contemptuous ease. Goddamnit, it was cold. Felt like the Elivagar were all meeting here, or something, and there was no Muspelheim to warm them – and look at that, he had picked something up of wizarding culture. Bloody Norse mythology.
Feeling for his wand, Harry pulled a long, thin stick out and stared at it with faint bewilderment crossing his face. It wasn't his wand – and he filed that under his tentative doubts that twitched at the back of his mind. It was made of some kind of black wood; properly made from the silky feel of the wood, but it hadn't been polished for months and there were chips and dents in the handle. Well-used, and it fit his hand as if made for it. Shrugging slightly – nothing ventured, nothing gained – he waved it, and a pleasantly warm feeling cascaded through his hand as a few green and gold sparks shot out. Sparks implied a fire creature in the core, but Harry doubted it was a phoenix feather. Dragon heartstring, maybe? Either way, it was a nice surprise. Most wands reacted badly with him.
Harry cast a warming charm, sighing in relief when heat slowly began to filter through his body, his sluggish blood flow speeding up. He clenched his fists slightly, rubbing his fingers to allow the charm to work more effectively, as he placed his wand back in his pocket. Now he'd be able to think this over properly, without being distracted by the cold.
He looked around, automatically checking for any cover he might find in a battle – a couple of ruined walls, but the remnants of the walls weren't large enough to duck behind really. They were jagged, melted black in some places, and completely destroyed in others. From the looks of it, he was standing in the middle of what had been a large room, before some kind of explosion had taken place…
Harry frowned, suspicions pestering him, and closed his eyes to try and visualise properly. Now, imagine he was where he'd been standing when he'd- he'd died. The Gryffindor table would be over there, ten paces and to the east – and yes, the room was big enough to encompass that. The Slytherin table would be twenty paces west, and then two paces down from there, there should be a hole no larger than a hand span wide, but a good few metres down, where one of the Founders had put the grounding marker for the anti-apparation ward. Harry opened his eyes to find that the snow covered all visible evidence of the hole (nice to know that his warming charm had been strong enough to stop him from even feeling the snow, he thought smugly), and with a wave of his wand, he cleared the snow away.
There was the hole, but from the look of it, with the sides too smooth and the whole thing just too intact overall-
Harry cast a muttered detego, jabbing his wand viciously, and nothing happened. Bugger. He'd miscast the spell again. He'd driven Flitwick mad with his inability to learn that charm. With an exasperated growl, he tried once more, moving his wand very deliberately and – oh yeah, it was the twist at the end of the movement that made it work, something to do with the key and lock-
A light cerulean blue hovered over the hole, almost blindingly strong as it pulsed, as if a heart beat, sending out waves of colour that slowly dissipated into the surroundings. That meant that the wards… were still up. And that didn't make any sense whatsoever, because they had damn well been destroyed. He'd fucking seen them fall.
Harry drew back slightly, twirling the wand over and over in his fingers; a nervous habit that he really needed to stop. Given up chewing on his fingernails, starting up more dangerous habits instead. He'd managed to set Tonks' hair on fire last time. A week or two ago? She hadn't been amused in the slightest, but respect for a senior officer had stopped her from doing more than just grumble malevolent curses under her breath, and then grown it back a neon green. He loved having authority, especially when it meant people couldn't take him down for his idiocy. He could almost see why the moron Fudge had tried to stay in power for so long. Thank God he'd died a couple of years ago, before the war had really started. He'd tried to interfere with what Rufus Scrimgeour had been doing, and the new Minister hadn't been happy with that.
Dragging his mind back to the problem at hand, Harry grimaced slightly. Think about it logically. Maybe the building he was standing in was just a transference over into Hel? He didn't exactly know what happened when you were dead, after all, and it might just be his surroundings when he died were imprinted on the landscape around him. But if that was the matter, where was everyone else? He knew loads of people had died; at least fifty aurors, and there had been ten times that number of Death Eaters, Voldemort among them. Here… He was the only one around. If the Valkyrie had taken them to Valhalla, then why was he the only one not there? It just didn't make sense. And it definitely didn't make sense that the anti-apparation ward was still up.
When had anything ever made sense, though?
He blew out a breath irritably, scraped a dirty strand of hair out of his eyes-
Wait-just-one-fucking-second. His hair wasn't long enough to fall into his eyes. He'd had a bloody army cut, shaved it all down, and it couldn't have grown more than an inch in the past month. He pulled a lock of hair down, went cross-eyed trying to see it, and was rewarded by the blurring shape of- of blond hair. Dirty, greasy blond hair, unwashed for who-knew how long, but blond nevertheless.
What the fuck was going on?
"Ostendo ipse," he muttered, flicking his wand and focusing clearly. Slowly, an image began to form, waves of magic coalescing to show a boy staring back at him. Grey eyes narrowed in concentration, face pale and slightly gaunt, blond hair falling down in thick, knotted tangles, almost down to his chin. Thin and underfed, quite short, but in a way that suggest he'd have a growth spurt later on in life, and that he simply hadn't been eating for a couple of days. That could be fixed with a few potions, he found himself thinking with a detached awareness. The faint flicker of green around one wrist showed a tracking spell – all aurors had them on, so no one would suspect them of going Dark or anything-
Harry drew the arm of his robes back slightly, irritably, to try and give himself greater movement for the next spell – and froze as the image did the same, arms baring to reveal a criss-cross of pale white scars across the entire of his forearm. Disbelievingly, he glanced down and saw the evidence on his own pallid skin. Looked like the blood-boiling curse – but the image, the body he was in, couldn't be more than fifteen, maybe sixteen. Who'd-
War, he reminded himself. He'd killed fifteen year olds; intimidated others into telling him what he needed to know, and he'd been restricted by the Ministry laws. Voldemort and his lot hadn't had those restrictions, and sometimes… sometimes what they did made him doubt their humanity.
The power for the spell abruptly ended with a jolt, and the image dispelled, letting the figure of the boy collapse into a blurry mass of smoke, before whipping away in the wind. Harry shuddered, and recast the warming charm over himself. At this rate he'd be running out of magic in a few hours, and it'd take at least a day or two for his source to produce more. It was time to shift this mystery to the back of his mind; he needed to find cover. Hogwarts' dungeons might still be in one piece, even if-
He looked around, and shook his head. It looked like… like the place where he had died, but the ruins were old – the sharp cracks of the walls were worn with age, and a few hardy mosses were growing in some places. They had to be at least twenty years old, and Hogwarts had been destroyed today, yesterday, whenever-
Harry felt his mouth twitch slightly. Maybe he'd done a Rip Van Winkle, fallen asleep for however many years. It wasn't funny, but, somehow, it was.
The smile faded abruptly from his face as he felt a nagging presence pushing at the back of his mind – someone was trying to get in; legilimancy. Harry felt his blood run cold as he tried to reinforce the walls of his mind, think of nothing. He'd managed to get better at occlumency, but even so-
He sank down into his mind, sensing the reassuring walls of Azkaban rise up around him – in the years after the Dementors had joined Voldemort, Azkaban had been used as an auror base, and in many ways it had become home. The winding passageways and deceptive twists and turns slowly became a model for his mind, and it was only too easy to twist there- just there- and force the intruder from his mind, leaving behind only the faintest traces of dingy green and clattering voices, that Harry attempted to chase only to see, out of the corner of his eye-
He let the intruder flee without a second thought, swivelling around to check his own fortifications, wondering what the hell as the walls of Azkaban faded out into a corridor he'd never seen before in his life, crossed swords hanging above a brightly-burning torch, an empty portrait on the other wall. Moving closer, Harry brought his hand up to touch the painting, and froze, his heart thudding erratically as an image flashed onto it.
Looking around warily, he cast his senses out to check if this was some sort of trick, but he could find no magic swirling around his mind, no hints of meddling. He could sense… unfamiliar rooms present though, places that shouldn't be there, and a gaping, aching pain running through the middle of his mind, a thick crack indicating that someone had broken through there, with no concern for sanity.
The smart thing to do, Harry thought, would be to back out, get into some cover and then try to explore the new surroundings before probing into any memories. Harry had never been particularly smart however; he left that to Hermione and the multitude of Ravenclaws who practically clamoured for the epithet. He was a Gryffindor – and it was precisely that reason that he stretched out his hand again and touched the portrait, letting the memories (they had to be memories, he realised somehow) sweep across him again.
Someone looks down on him, an annoyed look on their face as they realise he is awake. "You are a brat," the person said, and he blinked a few times, to make their blurry face come into focus in the semi-darkness of the room.
Male. Around sixteen years old, he reckons. Blond hair, blue eyes, looks a bit like the body he was in. The teenager talks again, trying to force a glower on his face and failing. "Do you know how much trouble you got me in with Dad, Jon? Seriously, couldn't you have just-"
"Lied?" Harry asks, his mouth moving of its own volition, and the voice that came out was the high-pitched one of a prepubescent boy. "Do you really think Dad would have fallen for it? You shouldn't have been so stupid."
The teenager – Alex, his mind provides; his brother – scowls, but before he can speak, Harry continues. "Like I said, Pansy can't keep her mouth shut, especially not about who she gets into bed with. You knew this'd happen, Alex."
"Yeah, but you didn't have to tell-"
There is a footstep outside, and Alex freezes. Harry can feel his own heart stop as he scuffles under the covers quickly, and then the door is creaking open-
Harry stumbled back slightly, confused. The memory seemed real and he'd been expecting – well, he didn't know what he'd been expecting. Leaning forward again-
It is darker, and he is shivering uncontrollably. A man is holding onto his arm tightly, his grip almost painful, and Harry scowls at him. His heart is beating rapidly, and he can barely breathe, and the eyes that turn on him are strangely sympathetic.
"Why I am here?" he asks, and his voice is lower now, but cracking with fear. The man doesn't answer; winces and turns away – but Harry knows why he is here. The Vidar squadron failed at a mission, and his father had been in charge of it. The Dark Lord does not like failure.
There is a knocking noise, and then the door swings open, and the person standing there is not human. Harry can faintly recognise him as Rabastan Lestrange – something about the nose, and the jaw – but he is different. The person he is in the memory feels no surprise at the demonic visage Rabastan now bears – eyes ringed with yellow, tattoos inked across his face, claws extended from his knuckles, horns curling out from behind his ears and too many muscles to be entirely human. Instead, there is just the mindless fear radiating off him and he wants to cry, but is determined to be brave.
The demon wrenches his arm, and he is forced to stumble after him. The man watches them go, and turns away abruptly even as Harry is forced outside, forced before the watching eyes of blank masks. Lestrange takes him to the centre of the circle, and then steps back to join a group of maybe fifteen others with the same demon eyes, varying only slightly in their appearances.
Harry is left, standing in the centre as his blood rushes through his veins. He tries to keep his face calm, but there is defiance shaking over him. He is so scared though, and he cannot prevent the quivering exclamation of fear as the Dark Lord steps forward – and fucking hell, that is not Voldemort, he thinks in disbelief.
It looks like the colour has been bleached out of him; white eyes, white hair, white face. He's some kind of bloody ice demon or something, Harry thinks – like the stories, but with the stories it's always an ice queen, and the Dark Lord is male. Otherwise it would be a Dark Lady, and that would just be weird. Girls always were too smart to try and take over the world, except for what's-her-name, back in the time of the Founders. Binns had tried to teach him about that, but he hadn't really been listening.
For a second, he wonders whether this is Voldemort, but the long fingers are his, and the face shape is his. It is a young-looking Tom Riddle, twenty five, twenty six, maybe, before the horcruxes affected him, but it is definitely him. What has he done to himself though, to make him look like this? Harry wonders. He has a nasty feeling that Voldemort has become a good deal more powerful, and he doesn't like the look of those other demons either.
He cannot think any more however, because Voldemort turns to the mass of Death Eaters, and gestures someone forward. Dad, his mind says, but Harry thinks that the eyes behind the mask are already too detached, as if trying to wish himself away from this place.
Voldemort smiles, and it is an eerie sight – but Harry is not thinking about that, for the Dark Lord speaks then, and his voice is that of the boy Harry had heard in the diary, in his second year. Instead he finds the shivers wracking through his body will not stop, and a helpless, incapacitating fear has seized his limbs.
"Vidar Squadron failed me, Rosier," Voldemort says.
Evan Rosier – for it must be him, Harry realises faintly, although the only thing he has seen of the man is a picture in an old newspaper, declaring his death – bows his head. "My Lord," he murmurs, and his voice wavers slightly.
"No matter," Voldemort says, dangerously soft. "You know the price."
He faces Harry then, and Harry can feel his hands clench into fists. He will be brave, he would be brave-
And then the words 'Fervio sanguis' are said, and he is screaming, because his blood, it's heating up and he swears, he can feel bubbling, boiling or something-
"Jonathon!" he can hear someone call out, but he is writhing on the ground, wanting the pain to end, stop it, stop it, stopitstopitstopit…
The spell is taken off, and his ragged breathing fills the clearing, breaking through the silence that has fallen over. Voldemort smiles, raises his wand again. "This is a new one," he says, "I've been waiting to try it out."
He points his wand at Harry and spoke, voice cold. "Frango animum."
Frango – I break, Harry thinks as the spell flashes towards him. Animum – the soul, spirit or mind. I break the mind. Mind breaker. The spell hits him, and-
It feels like he is being torn apart, like dogs are sinking there teeth into his very being. He tries to pull it all back together, but it hurts, hurt like- hurt like-
Harry ripped himself out of the memory, out of his mind, and staggered down, collapsing weakly on the snow. Distantly, he could feel his robes soaking through as his warming charm crumpled, but that was not important.
Those memories-
He winced, and shuddered, uncertain what to think. They weren't his memories, but they were too detailed to be made-up – memories that had been falsified tended to be blurred, or with obvious changes. Slughorn's, for example, while obviously fake was the typical altered memory; it was very difficult to make them feel real. Luna was the only one he knew that had ever managed something vaguely authentic.
But if they weren't fake, that meant-
He slowly pushed himself up, grimacing as he realised that his fingers were going numb in the cold snow. Clearing a space by one of the ruined walls, Harry slumped down on the dying grass, still wet from the snow he had just melted – and bugger, he was only wearing boxers under his robes. Robes, which now he thought about it, looked suspiciously like a wizard's traditional indoor ones, albeit indoor ones that had been dragged through several forests and ripped many times. Great. Just bloody great.
Okay. Thinking this through. He let his eyes slip down to the flash of the tracking spell around his wrist, traced a finger over it slowly, stroking it to reassure himself. He'd woken up – when he was supposed to be dead, because he had definitely felt something hit the back of his head, and hard. He'd been in something that looked like the ruins of Hogwarts, but maybe a good twenty years on from when they'd been destroyed. Alright, possibility of time travel there. He was no good at this stuff, but he was pretty certain you couldn't travel into the future. Something about you couldn't go into something that didn't exist yet and… well, Harry had tuned out the rest of Hermione's lecture, frankly.
Hermione, he thought and his heart ached briefly. Hermione and Ron. They would have hated being paired together like that – hell, they'd had the most explosive break up Harry had ever seen in their seventh year, something about Ron trying to push Hermione and Hermione thinking she was above Ron, and they hadn't talked to each other for months. And then Hermione had died, killed by that bastard Malfoy Junior, and Ron had gone in on a rescue mission, not knowing she was already dead. His head had been sent back to Molly – his mother had been traumatised after that, and Arthur hadn't been much better.
No. Back on task.
So, there was the faint possibility of time travel. However, he was in someone else's body, which didn't sound much like time travel – a Jonathon? Jon? That's what he had been called in the memory. So, he could probably rule time travel out. Next thing would be the memories – they didn't seem false, and they could be remnants of this Jonathon's mind.
This just didn't make sense, he thought despondently. He was already getting a headache from having to think all this crap through, and he hadn't even broached the subject that was worrying him most – the demons, and the altered Lord Voldemort.
It's not my business, he told himself firmly. He'd killed his Voldemort – because he was beginning to get a feeling that this wasn't his home, or his place – and this new one was not his business. Bugger the hero complex. He sighed, stared down at the ground. He should really attempt to recast another warming charm; his fingers had long gone numb, and he was beginning to think the rest of his body would soon follow. He didn't like the idea of using the reserves from his battle magic though-
His musing was interrupted by a shout - "Jonathon!" – and Harry got to his feet and looked up despite himself to see a man striding across the ruined landscape of Hogwarts, blond hair tousled in the wind and ears and nose red from cold.
Who-?
Tensed on the balls of his feet, Harry found his hand creeping towards his wand, and he waited for the man to get into cursing range. Don't kill him, he thought, you can get information out of him, and the man almost ran across as he caught sight of Harry, stumbling over the walls. Damnit – the tracking charm. If he wasn't in his body, it wouldn't be the auror charm-
"Heimdall, Jon, how did you get to Hogwarts of all places?"
Nearly, nearly – there. "Petrificus totalus," he hissed, jabbing his wand-
-And realised he should have waited, because the man saw it coming and flung himself to the floor, letting it skid over his head. Damnit. There went the element of surprise. He took a few skip-steps to the side, snarled a 'Stupefy', and then swore as it was returned his way, passing through a shield that wasn't there-
He'd become too used to fighting with people, having a Shielder to guard his attack. Not a smart thing to do, because now he couldn't fucking remember a decent shield – protego was no use against the more powerful spells, and that meant-
"Contego," he said softly, spreading his wand in the right movement, feeling vaguely smug as a glowing shield emerged. There, that should hold for a while – and the man approached more warily, eyeing him.
"Jon, it's me for crying out loud!" he shouted. "Stop playing games!"
And what? he thought wryly, ignoring the reference to 'Jon'. Drop his shield and let a stranger come within striking distance? Like fucking hell. He prepared another spell, ignoring the aimed 'expelliarmus' coming his way – his shielding might not be perfect, but he was sure it could reflect that-
-His wand was tugged out of his hand, leaving his hand to spasm uselessly as the grip collapsed, and he stared in disbelief as it flew through his shield and into the man's outstretched hand. What the fuck? He- What-
"Contego doesn't block the minor spells. You should know that," the man said, tucking Harry's wand into a robe pocket and sounding quite smug. As he came closer, his eyes seemed hopeful for a second, scanning Harry's face, looking for something, but Harry wasn't quite sure what – and then the hope flickered out again.
"It's Alex, Jon," the man- Alex said in a defeated tone, and sighed, his shoulders slumping. "Almost thought you were back to normal there, 'specially when you tried to attack me. We felt a huge burst a magic from here and-" A pause, and he shook his head. Forcing a smile onto his face, Alex put a hand on Harry's shoulder, and Harry barely kept from trying to punch him, suddenly all-too aware that this Alex was a good few inches taller than him, and easily broader across the shoulders. "Never mind, kiddo. Dad went insane searching for you – I don't know how you get to these places, even with the tracking charm we placed on you. You must be fucking freezing – and where are your shoes?"
Oh bugger. Jon? Alex? Dad? From the sounds of it, the guy who had his wand seemed to think he was- was the person from those memories. And he was here, in a place he didn't really recognise anymore, with some patched-up memories of some kid who was apparently completely mental, with someone who probably wouldn't be too happy if Harry decided to enlighten him that he was, in fact, not this 'Jon', but instead a twenty year old Harry Potter from an apparently different world, who just happened to displace his brother's soul – all by complete accident. And, uh, the part when he'd tried to attack this 'Alex'? Pure mistake. No harm done right? So, they could just go their separate ways, and there was no chance of this working, bugger.
Someone up there was laughing at him.
And goddamnit, it had started snowing again.
Nithog – serpent who resides in hell, chewing on Yggdrasil.
Yggdrasil – the world tree
Elivagar – eleven rivers of ice
Muspelheim – home of the fire giants; responsible for melting the ice of the Elivagar.
Valkyrie – warrior women who escort those who died in battle to Valhalla.
Valhalla – heaven for warriors who died in battle
Heimdall – god of light and protection; watchman of the gods.