An Incomplete Potter Collection ch Collection 12
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The Lucky King
Potter's Bride
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Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
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Story: [The Lucky King]
Summary:
Crossover: (Campione) / (Harry Potter)
Genre: Humor, Adventure
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It was a not-so-well-known-fact that all magical spells had a source. A place from which to draw power.
Some of those sources were more benign than others, some of them could be harmful to the user, and quite a lot of them were mostly quite apathetic towards those who siphoned off their endlessly vast powers for an insignificant ability to do something that would've otherwise been impossible.
In some places, hidden away and far far away from anyone who would condemn them for doing so, these 'sources' were called 'gods'. Like they'd been called, once upon a time, unknown ages ago.
No magical academic worth their salt would even entertain the thought of consider this superstitious nonsense as anything other than just that. Nonsense.
But they had no choice but to grudgingly agree that there were definitely a 'source' that corresponded with any given spell, and the sources of certain spells were a lot more forgiving than others.
So, in an effort to keep anyone from foolishly attempting to use spells that belonged to sources that truly were maliciously inclined even towards their own caster, the Ministries of the Magical World bounded together and labeled them Dark.
But, as such things always go, time passed and people forgot the exact reasoning behind the labels. It wasn't as if it was common knowledge that spells had corresponding sources to draw magic from, and so those who didn't know better found other ways to explain why or why not a spell was classified as Dark. Or should be classified as Dark.
Some families of course remembered the old reasons, that only those with the strength of will necessary – to stand before that endless source and face its hatred head-on – could possible wield it. And that it was easier to simply make it illegal to use, than to screen each and every magic-user who wanted to try their hands on it, or clean the blood of the unlucky ones out of the nobles' carpets.
Blood and guts had a way to really ruin textiles.
Regardless, it was mostly forgotten, and even those who knew of it only did so because of a desire for pointless history. It wasn't as if knowing of the source of the magic made any difference whatsoever when it came to actually using it, so it truly was a wasteful use of academical time and effort to even suggesting looking into it.
But of course, for a man obsessed with immortality, history was as good a place as any to start looking. So, even if he found no real use for it, Tom Riddle learned.
And then came the day when he stood before the pathetic infant who was supposed to bring about his defeat.
In most worlds, he would look the innocent child in the eye, and curse it to death with a triumphant smile. In most worlds the child's mother and Voldemort's offer to let her live, would invoke a chain-reaction that would use that same curse to kill him in return.
Instead, this time, Voldemort decided that he would demonstrate his knowledge of things beyond anyone else, by doing something unheard of.
He pulled upon the source of the infamous Killing Curse, and succeeded in doing something that was so deep into reckless madness that no author of any book had ever considered to warn against it. He called the source into the world.
And so it was that a God touched the world outside of its Legend for the first time in countless aeons.
And no matter how powerful the willing sacrifice of the child's mother might've been, it was less than a gnat before the power of a God.
However, the God's attention was focused on the man who'd so foolishly dared to summon it in order to force it to obey his whims, leaving the infant a few more precious moments of life as the God dealt with the impudent mortal before it first.
Thus ended the reign of Voldemort, and were it not for the artifacts that he'd carefully hidden across the country, he would've been no more. Then again, those same horrifyingly fragile artifacts shrouded in mortal magic, were placed within the same country as the angered God.
It was really only a matter of time until the God had finished burning down all of mankind's creations and, as a side-effect, forever removed Voldemort from existence.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, even Gods in their perfect power and grace, can get unlucky.
Harry, not entirely sure what was going on, but childishly convinced that the God was mean, threw a toy at it.
Had it been anything else, had it been any other God, and had it been in any other situation, Harry would've died.
As it was, the God behind the Killing Curse was a raging vortex of power and hate, but kind of clumsy in flesh. Which was perhaps understandable, considering that it hadn't actually worn flesh in enough time that it didn't technically remember its own name anymore.
As it turned towards the child, its very existence echoing the sudden fury of being defied in such a pathetic manner, it tripped. And broke its neck.
And so it was that Harry James Potter, at the age of fifteen months, became not only the first Campione in recorded history, but also the absolute youngest such that had ever existed.
If there'd been a community built around the worship of Campiones as Devil Kings then he would've probably become known as the Lucky King – for surely nobody else could claim to be favored by luck more than he. As it was however, he instead became known as the Boy-Who-Lived, for surviving the Killing Curse – the energies of which still lingered unusually powerfully in the shattered remains of the house.
And perhaps it was quite lucky indeed, that nobody thought to cast any spells on the infant child after such a traumatic event.
It's not like they would've worked, after all.
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Harry Potter was a strange child.
Not because sometimes strange things happened around him, but rather because there were some things about him that just didn't make sense.
He was strong, easily capable of arm-wrestling a grown man and winning, and few things actually seemed to be capable of injuring him. Though, whenever he did get injured, he also healed unnaturally fast.
Had Harry Potter grown up in a magical household, people would've been amazed by it all. As it was, the Dursleys merely assumed that all 'freaks' were just as 'freakish' as he was.
Still, with his physical attributes, nobody ever dared to bully him, and most of the people his age would hurriedly back down if he was offended by their actions. There was no need to pick a fight with someone who could break your bones without even really trying, after all.
Thus, whilst his life wasn't exactly happy, and he most certainly wasn't loved, Harry Potter grew up without too many difficulties heaped upon his shoulders. And he grew up knowing that he was definitely different. Somehow.
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Story: Potter's Bride
Summary: Harry/Gabrielle. Harry's heroic rescue ends with a magically-enforced marriage, nobody is much pleased by this. But life goes on.
Genre: A bit of Romance, Fluff, Family?
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In the beginning , she'd been a cheerfully dreamy to his own shocked horror; but, as she lay there, clutching the sheets, slowly emerging from her childish daydream to realize that when the princess was married off to the hero who saved her, she stopped living in her parents' castle.
She wasn't a Delacour anymore, and she was trapped in a country speaking a language she didn't understand, with a boy that she barely knew, well away from the comforting presences of her parents.
Harry shook his head, a resigned pity for the girl in front of him finally drowning out the earlier outrage as she cried into their bedsheets.
Because it was their bed now. No getting around that. Regardless of their age or what Harry had been raised to believe was proper.
Okay, 'had been raised' as in 'had figured out after watching people who weren't the Dursleys'. Because blood relatives or not, those people were not only shitty role-models, they were deceitful liars too, and would've taken great pleasure in teaching him things wrongly in an attempt to get him into trouble.
Still, he'd apparently gotten married to this eight-year-old girl of veela descent.
If it weren't for the fact that Harry opposed genocide as a whole and been far too uncomfortable with the thought of actually committing murder to attempt it, he might've been inclined to start hunting down veela and find a way to permanently ensure that they and their descendants never put another person into this situation again.
Marry the little girl that you just saved, or watch her die.
Lovely. It was the kind of ultimatum that he was honestly coming to expect from the Wizarding World. Nothing could ever be simply anymore, they had to have the most absurd of laws and the strangest of traditions, and with magic itself somehow getting involved to directly enforce those laws, there wasn't really any way to escape from them.
So, he'd married an eight-year-old girl. All the while radiating a controlled fury towards the ones forcing this decision upon him.
It should be noted that after Ginny's explosion and his subsequent reaction, the Weasley family were sensibly making very sure to keep their distance until he'd calmed down.
All things considered, that might be about a decade from now, when it would be socially acceptable – according to Harry's terms of such, since the Wizarding World seemed far too cheerful with accepting their age-difference for his comfort – for him to actually bed the girl that had apparently become his wife.
The sexual frustration he could imagine beginning to appear once he'd grown up a bit more, of being caught in a marriage where touching his 'lover' made him feel like a despicable pervert, was not something Harry believed would help his current anger at the situation die down.
Thankfully, it seemed like those urges were a few years away still, so maybe he'd be able to calm the bloody hell down before teenage hormones started interfering with his already sour mood.
Still, he wasn't angry at Gabrielle.
If anyone were to blame for this mess, it were the judges who'd decided on the usage of hostages for the Second Task, Gabrielle's parents for giving permission for those same judges to put their daughter in a dangerous situation, Fleur for putting her name in the Goblet of Fire in the first place, and the entire Wizarding World for – upon hearing of the bond between them – jumping at the opportunity to administer a gigantic wedding in their honor.
Yes, those people, Harry were perfectly willing to be upset at for the current situation.
Gabrielle, sniffling pathetically as she were, was... well, being mad at her was beyond pointless. It wasn't her idea to become a hostage, it wasn't her idea to be rescued by a boy who knew better than to trust the authority figures with anything more precious than a piece of string – and most certainly not with the investigation of crimes – and whilst she might've acted like she was living the dream there briefly, she was a little girl who'd been told that she got to marry the handsome, famous, and rich older boy who'd just saved her life.
Her enthusiasm had been understandable, even if he hadn't reciprocated it.
So, now here he was, sitting on the edge of his bed, staring out the window and listening to the heaving sobs of his prepubescent wife.
Sometimes, he hated his life.
With a sigh, he reached out and began to rub what was hopefully soothing circles against the girl's back.
He wasn't good at touching other people, the Dursleys weren't exactly good teachers about anything other than how to do chores and take insults without complaining. But Hermione and Ron had helped thaw some of that, even if the thought of comforting other people remained a completely alien existence for him.
It seemed like his attempt at comforting was at least doing something however, as Gabrielle's sobbing slowly began to settle into the slow breathing of sleep.
Harry turned to stare out the window again. Having had his bed relocated to a 'more proper' location as he was now expected to share it with his wife, he now had a rather different view of the castle grounds than he was used to from the boys' dorms.
Shaking his head and giving up on trying to overwrite the newness of the view with the everyday boredom that his old dorm had had, Harry sank back into the bed and asked himself if he ought to extract some manner of vengeance against the judges for causing this whole bloody mess.
Sleep overtook him before he could come to any definite conclusions.
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Waking up was something that Harry had never appreciated.
At the Dursleys, waking up had been the realization that he hadn't suddenly been rescued from his cupboard by the social services, and that he would be forced to work himself to the bone for another day of insults.
At Hogwarts, waking up meant the realization that he wouldn't be able to go back to sleep due to the other boys' snoring, that he would be forced to deal with 'role-models' who were either secretly apathetic or openly judgmental, and that he'd have to witness the wonders of the magical world be turned into muck by the humans practicing that same magic.
It wasn't so much that he believed himself better than everyone else. But rather that magic had been something of a childhood dream for him as a way to escape from the Dursleys, and now that he was living it, he felt a bit like he was still stuck in Surrey with his relatives.
So, all in all, waking up for Harry was generally not a pleasant thing, even if it usually helped quell the most prominent of whatever nightmares he might have during the night.
The fact that this morning was a little bit different however became readily apparent when he realized that something warm was attached to his side. It smelled like soap, in a pleasant enough way, and it was making slight noises as if it was breathing.
This meant that either he'd gotten a pet – beyond his friend Hedwig – and invited it into sleeping in his bed, or he'd somehow managed to get laid last night. Of course, considering that he was still clothed, he was leaning more towards the 'pet'-theory.
It was during this calm analysis that he was suddenly struck by the memory of what exactly had happened the previous day.
Groaning in frustration at the realization that Gabrielle – his new wife – was using him like a giant teddy bear, Harry opened his eyes to confirm that yes, it most certainly hadn't been a horrible nightmare.
He really hated his life sometimes.
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Holding up in Gryffindor Tower wouldn't exactly solve any problems.
Firstly, because it allowed for quite a few more rumors than would've spread had the Hogwarts rumor-mill actually seen them interact, and secondly, because they'd have to emerge from the Tower eventually.
It was one thing to end up marrying Gabrielle, that most students would be able to get a grip on, but to then spend the next few days hidden away in their shared bedroom? There was no way that that wouldn't be seen as a honeymoon. And, considering the age of the wife, that would be detrimental to his reputation.
Crawling out of their shared bed, Harry glanced out the window and made a face.
It looked like the winter had decided to make one final push before giving in to spring, because it was snowing outside.
In February.
Kind of put the whole 'let's have people dive into a lake'-idea into a rather insane perspective. Harry felt himself wondering if the other Champions had thought of making warming charms work alongside whatever else they'd used to reach the hostages. He hadn't had to worry about that himself, since gillyweed made the cold a bit more liveable, but the others might seriously have risked hypothermia.
It would also explain why he'd been so horrifyingly cold when the gillyweed had finally stopped functioning, and he'd had to drag Ron and Gabrielle back to land on his own power.
That had been a pretty miserable day all around.
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So maybe they'd avoided the Great Hall by going to the kitchen instead, but that was in part because Gabrielle was a little bit jumpy and Harry didn't want to deal with other people more than absolutely necessary today.
Preferably, they'd find something to do that was perfectly in the public eye, whilst still allowing them their privacy. So that nobody suspected them of illicit activities, but that didn't force them to deal with the annoyances of well-wishers and not-so-well-wishers.
It was about that time that Harry realized that Gabrielle lived in France, and that even England got a bit of snow in the winter – usually anyway – but that the same might not be true further south. He realized this because his new wife kept looking out the window with awe on her face.
Remembering the whimpering cries of a prepubescent girl stolen from her parents by circumstances, Harry sighed.
He didn't want her to be unhappy. She didn't deserve to be unhappy.
Turning to Dobby, he asked a question. "Do you think you could get her something warm enough for her to play in the snow?"
Dobby was always an enthusiastic helper.
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The snow was wet, the air was cold, his glasses had fogged up repeatedly, his back hurt from pushing the ball of snow around, and Gabrielle was smiling.
It wasn't a bad day spent, Harry reflected with a small smile as he watched Dobby and Gabrielle 'discuss' the latest of snowman fashion.
From the charades that they were implementing to bridge the language-barrier, Dobby was insisting that socks were of dire importance to any proper snowman, whilst Gabrielle was arguing that you should only wear socks on your feet, and snowmen didn't have feet so the sock-point was clearly pointless.
If it weren't for the fact that Harry knew that they'd been getting along far too well for it, he would've worried that their discussion would've descended into an all-out brawl. As it was, he was happy to continue drinking his Dobby-provided warm chocolate and rest from all of the pushing and lifting.
It didn't feel right to use magic when building snowmen. Especially when it was Gabrielle's first time making a snowman, and she wasn't old enough yet to contribute to building it with magic of her own.
So they'd rolled snow, and then they'd lifted snow, and then Dobby had provided them with a properly traditional carrot-nose, and the discussion over proper clothing had erupted. A discussion that Harry was thankful to be left out of, as he quite frankly didn't care all that much about it.
Still, he was happy that the discussion had happened, because it kept them all out here in open view and clearly busy, which meant that the Hogwarts rumor-mill should at least not start going on about his deviancy.
Hopefully, anyway.
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Harry winced silently as Gabrielle's ice-cold feet made contact with unprotected skin, trying to shift so that his pajamas would cover that particular part of him, but still remain unmoving enough that Gabrielle wouldn't notice it.
It felt awkward to be used as a teddy bear by the small girl, but it wasn't horribly uncomfortable and it made the whole 'lying awake without being able to fall asleep'-thing slightly more interesting than what he'd grown used to it being.
Instead of listening to Ron's snores rattling the windows – they normally didn't, but some nights he wasn't so sure – or stare blankly up at the uninteresting ceiling, he was left to listen to Gabrielle's soft breathing and feel her regular heartbeat echo his own. And if his fingers were for some reason fascinated by the silky feel of her hair, then that was okay. Because being attracted to his far-too-young wife's hair at least didn't make him feel like a pervert.
There'd been quite a few who'd sneered after him and the girl next to him – Malfoy and Snape the most obvious perpetrators – but nobody seemed to dare to make a move about it, and he was getting better with his French as Gabrielle was beginning to pick up on English.
They were different languages, but some words were spelled in a reminiscent way of each other in both languages, and Hermione could often provide some form of translation – though she too mostly kept her distance in order to not get involved in whatever explosion that was bound to happen sooner or later.
Fleur hadn't approved of her sister's marriage, but also hadn't opposed it – it was to save her sister's life after all – and seemed to be giving the two newlyweds space.
So it was Gabrielle and Harry, with frequent visits from Dobby, and some greetings from Hermione, Ron, and Fleur.
If it weren't for the fact that Gabrielle had a child's ability to babble a-mile-a-minute without stopping for breath, he supposed that he might've felt lonely about his friends' missing presences. But as it was, he was too busy trying to keep his wife from doing anything socially unacceptable or dangerous.
He was fourteen, and he was married.
Harry glanced down at Gabrielle's sleeping face, finding himself thinking that at least hanging around her didn't make him miserable. He remembered hearing that that was an actual danger in arranged marriages, and was happy that he'd been spared of at least that.
Clenching his eyes shut as he suppressed another wince, Harry just wished that her feet weren't so god-awfully cold.
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Two days later, Harry awoke to Gabrielle jumping on the bed, crying.
"Harry! Harry! Help! He's dying!"
Shooting up out of bed at hearing of a threat to someone's life, Harry was left feeling rather peeved at the innocent little girl when he realized whom exactly she was talking about.
It seemed as if the snow was thawing once more, and the snowman they'd built was not long for this world.
Thankfully, the last few days had allowed them some ability to make sensible conversations despite the original language-barrier, and Harry could therefore explain to the small girl that it was normal for snow to melt away, and that snowmen's life-cycle was shorter than most things but that it was that which made them precious.
Obviously, Gabrielle didn't agree with him at all, and demanded that there had to be some way that they could save him. That there had to be a way to preserve him.
Which made Harry comment that some people tried to keep them alive in fridges and the like, but that that wasn't a good life for them.
So Gabrielle declared that they were going to use magic to let the snowman remain standing on Hogwarts grounds even through the summer months, all the way until winter had arrived again, and then they could make him friends.
Harry stared at the small girl for a long moment, feeling strangely warm at the girl's fierce determination.
Then he grabbed his wand.
Perhaps it wasn't natural, perhaps it wasn't entirely sensible. But he didn't want to make her sad, so he decided to help.
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Harry muttered something especially foul as he tried to figure out just how the hell he was supposed to explain 'this does that because of-' in a manner that would take up the minimum amount of required text – rather than the four sentences that he'd managed it in so far.
He was leaning towards writing the whole thing with the largest sized letters he could get away with. Unfortunately, he wasn't entirely sure what size that was, which meant that the problem persisted.
A part of him was bizarrely surprised that his inventive usage of words hadn't landed him a smack on the head, courtesy of Hermione. Then again, he wasn't studying in the Gryffindor common room – it seemed as if the Weasley twins had finally decided to make a spectacle of themselves again, and Harry was sensibly staying as far away from the resulting mess as possible.
"What does that mean?"
Harry flinched at the innocent voice coming from where he'd forgotten Gabrielle's presence.
"Nothing." He hurriedly tried to assure the girl, knowing full-well that someone would be taking out their displeasure on his hide if they found out that he'd been teaching her how to curse.
"It didn't sound like 'nothing'." Gabrielle argued, her nose wrinkling in annoyance at her curiosity being denied.
Harry briefly considered trying to distract her somehow, before realizing that he was rubbish at lying. "Look, it's not something that you're supposed to say."
"I know that." She threw a glare at him, one which was kind of pathetic when compared to some of the glares that Harry had grown used to over the years, before continuing. "I was asking what it meant."
Harry hesitated momentarily, before shrugging. "It means that-..."
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"Harry!" Hermione hissed furiously at the boy who looked torn between snickering helplessly and groaning. "What were you thinking?"
Harry rubbed absently at where Hermione had nailed him with a book. "I was thinking that she was going to learn those words sooner or later anyway, because I'm going to be spending the rest of my life with her, and I have Snape as a professor."
"What does Professor Snape have to do with it?" Hermione frowned.
"Well... let's just say that he inspires me." Harry shrugged with as innocent a grin as he could manage.
She still nailed him with a book for that one. But he'd heard Ron stifle a laugh from the other side of the room, so Harry was still counting it as a win.
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Harry wasn't sure whether to sigh or smile as Gabrielle went over to talk to the snowman that had been relocated to behind Hagrid's hut.
For childish reasons that were so far beyond his comprehension that it was actually kind of funny, his wife had decided that she didn't want the snowman to 'feel lonely' and would now – if possible – visit it once a day to talk with it. Apparently, one of the first thing she'd promised the now heat-resistant snowman was that she would make him some friends during the next winter.
Harry didn't really mind either way, and though it'd been a bit of a pain to relocate the snowman to a place where somebody – cough, Malfoy, cough – would try and hex it into oblivion for daring not to melt away, even that had been something he hadn't minded all too much. Hagrid had been more than happy to help keep the snowman safe, and it meant that the whole anti-melting spell-casting hadn't turned into a giant waste of time.
He didn't exactly 'get along' with Gabrielle, but they... listened to each other. And from what Harry had seen of the magical world, finding someone who'd actually do that before declaring him to be insane for thinking differently from themselves, was quite rare indeed.
She was getting better at English, he was getting better at French, and he was getting used to how his social circle seemed to have shifted.
Ron was still slightly distant after his sister's rather extreme reaction to the marriage, Hermione seemed to have slipped closer into being Ron's friend than his own, and Harry was fairly sure that those two might start dating one of these days. Most of everyone else that he knew had all reached the point where they simply shrugged and continued on as normal. As for the rest of Hogwarts... they still kept their distance, they still spread rumors, and Harry had finally resigned himself to it all.
Sure, having them whispering behind his back was something that had always gone in waves, but he didn't think it was going to stop this time around. His marriage with Gabrielle was after all fairly different from how the usual Hogwarts-Incidents resolved themselves. The 'parselmouth incident' was probably the most obvious one, where being able to speak parseltongue had made him a target, and then everyone had apologized when he'd proved himself innocent.
In other words, he would normally end up being accused for something that he didn't do, and then manage to prove himself innocent. However, no matter how innocent his intent had been, he'd definitely married Gabrielle, and one day – as divorce really wasn't an option, because magic – he imagined that she would become the mother of his children. Which was kind of very disturbing to think about, really, but there was thankfully a lot of time to go before either of them might start to seriously consider that.
Sure, the gossiping about him being a newlywed would probably lessen sooner or later, but he couldn't really work up a lot of angry indignation about it, because it wasn't actually lies. Unless the rumors implied him being some kind of a deviant. Those ones kind of pissed him off.
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