Prompt by u/fiachra12 on r/HPfanfiction
The typical Grey Independent Harry Potter-Black comes back to Hogwarts a changed man. So much so that people start to wonder if he's an imposter like Mad-Eye the year before.
Who are you and what have you done with Harry Potter?
It was the summer of 1996 that Harry Potter decided he'd had enough. After an entire year of things going from terrible to even worse, after more heartbreak and loss than he'd ever believed one person could bear and still be alive, he took a good long look at himself and decided he no longer liked who he was.
He'd let Sirius die. He'd let Hermione and Ron and Ginny and Neville and Luna follow him into danger. He'd been helpless before Voldemort, needed Dumbledore to save him.
He'd been good. He'd been merciful. He'd been noble.
And Voldemort was right. That had been nothing but weakness.
Harry's newfound position of power with the Dursleys allowed him an unprecedented level of freedom. They were terrified to cross Moody, so basically took to pretending Harry didn't exist and never trying to deny him anything. He made sure to capitalize on this attitude, having all too much experience with their relapses at the slightest provocation.
Dudley spent as much time as possible far away from Harry, Vernon spent more evenings at work than ever before, and Petunia's social life suddenly developed to the point where she actually left the house for hours each evening for 'events' of increasingly unclear nature at the homes of various gossipy women of her dubious acquaintance.
Harry didn't care what they did so long as they left him alone, and thus the summer passed with the least amount of Dursley-related drama on record. With a welcome absence of Voldemort in his head, his summer was off to a perfect start.
Harry didn't waste his freedom. He spent hours composing letters to every shop in Diagon Alley that remained open - a surprising number of shopowners had simply packed up and fled the country at the first official news of Voldemort's return, along with nearly a third of the lower-middle class who could afford to do so. Several dozen purchases later, once his inquiries for further material were met with negative answers, he turned to anyone else he could find.
He spent one harrowing afternoon collecting names and addresses along Knockturn Alley, and even braved the confusing depths of Fine Alley (which turned out to contain nothing fine at all, and a great many desperate criminals. If not for his impressive skill with the disarming charm, he suspected he'd not have survived.)
Armed with this information, he continued his mail-order search, expanding yet again as the black-market sellers balked to deal with The Harry Potter. And a great many of those who did sell to him - at exorbitant prices - then promptly joined their above-board peers in fleeing the country.
This last expansion proved the most fruitful. In looking beyond humans to the underworld of vampires, werewolves, and hags, he encountered at last what he'd been so circumspectly pursuing this whole time: true, Dark Magic. The kind of power it would take to face Voldemort head on and win.
Moody - or false-Moody at least - had shown them the Unforgivables. But as Harry had discovered to his detriment, the mere words were insufficient with these darkest of curses.
He did not manage to purchase anything about the Unforgiveables through the Gringotts-brokered Dark Creatures Alliance mail order service; that would be a bridge too far even for a vampire. But he did obtain the next best thing. Manuals, spellbooks, and primitive-bound collections of notes so ancient they were not forbidden for the simple fact that no one remembered their existence any longer.
Dudley walked by, having just woken from a morning nap on the sofa, as Harry accepted one of these books. The mere aura of evil pouring from the volume was sufficient that the older boy swooned on the spot, sending Aunt Petunia into a fit.
Harry grinned at her, gave Dudley a sharp prod to wake him up, and shrugged in a 'no big deal, he's fine' kind of way as he carried his Dark manual upstairs to his room.
Where ordinarily summer dragged on eternally until he could return to Hogwarts, this summer passed in a blur of studying and experimentation. He couldn't cast spells without bringing the wrath of the ministry down on him, but he could perform rituals. They required no wand magic, being a deeper and darker power. Every newer book warned that, since not amplified by a wand, these spells would be of lesser power than their newer counterparts.
Modern magic was so far from the peak mentioned in the rare, 'uninteresting' books Harry had been sold, he found it absurd. In Grindelwald's era, students Harry's age were already adept at wordlessly casting spells Harry had never even heard of.
The first war with Voldemort had done more damage to the wizarding world than anyone had realized. With a general drive toward more regulations and restrictions on how and where magic could be used, he saw that Umbridge was merely the latest in a long line of those seeking to weaken future generations through ignorant cowardice.
Whether for fear of future Dark Lords, or to prevent someone like Albus Dumbledore accruing the amount of personal power - however well utilized - over them again, the ministry had slowly and systematically crippled modern wizardry. And in doing so, sabotaged themselves.
Harry's 'weak' rituals were far beyond the strength of even NEWT-level students. They were time-consuming, completely impractical for combat use, but of undeniable utility when attempting to make oneself stronger.
He had one more year left of protection at Privet Drive, one more year in which to prepare. Harry had no doubt that Voldemort would appear before him to finish their prophesied conflict the moment the blood enchantment of his mother's protection fell.
He had to be ready by then, and nothing else mattered.
His vault, once so unimaginable in its riches, soon felt utterly insufficient. Ancient and Dark magic didn't come cheap.
Harry paid without hesitation.
One of his cheapest purchases was a recently-vacated flat in Knockturn Alley, where he set up any ritual circles which were too big to fit in his bedroom or the Dursleys' sitting room. He didn't dare visit often, always under disillusionment lest the Death Eaters find him, but made sure his trips were productive.
By the end of July, Harry had enough enchantments layered upon his person that he could have stood in front of a freight train without fear of injury. By the second week of August, he'd created a complex illusionary world wherein he could perfectly test any spell without actually casting it.
By the end of June, he'd perfected time travel. Not the first June, naturally; it took him until August 26th, and only transported him back a maximum of two months.
The ingredients required by the ritual for reversing time cost more than everything else put together. Harry didn't hesitate. After all, he'd get everything back in the past, and no one would be the wiser.
He intercepted his past self on his first trip into Knockturn Alley, lurking down Fine Alley until the opportune moment. He vaguely remembered being accosted by a madman the first time around, but not until he found himself disarmed and stunned did he realize his redo-the-past-month plan wouldn't be as simple as he'd anticipated. But perhaps it was better this way. He didn't want to be erased in a time paradox.
Not one to give up, he made an in-person visit to Gringotts and did a lot more haggling than he'd anticipated before finally collecting his inheritance from Sirius, and being put in contact with the Dark Creatures Alliance. This time, it turned out that they did happen to have a single book on the Unforgiveable Curses.
Harry smiled and purchased it, asking for their full catalogue to be made available for him to peruse at his leisure. They agreed, and his past self continued to accrue the necessary books and materials.
Harry rented a second flat adjacent to his old (future) one, where he continued his research at an accelerated rate. He could afford the materials for the time-reversal ritual one more time, but that would bring his bank vault to dangerously low amounts. With the utmost reluctance, he resigned himself to only getting a single do-over.
He returned to the Dursleys' house at night, unwilling to sleep somewhere unprotected, and borrowed his invisibility cloak to sleep under. Knowing himself to be a late sleeper, he forcefully changed his own schedule to early mornings and strict bedtimes. This necessitated a new solution to his concealment, however; his past self would have noticed his cloak missing every evening, as he tended to keep it close.
There was a ritual for that too. In one frenzied afternoon while Harry 1 was out purchasing his flat, Harry drew out the required circle in Dudley's room and forcefully evicted his cousin to sleep on the sofa. Dudley didn't complain.
This time around, Harry didn't waste any time. He was in his ritual flat every day, sunup to sundown, experimenting with spell creation and studying darker and darker curses. He revisited Fine Alley to practice his Imperio and Crucio. It surprised him that the latter came more easily, but he supposed that having lived with Dudley his entire life, he had more experience to draw upon when it came to pain and fear.
He developed his own variation, somewhere between the two, inspired by the draught of living death; one which paralyzed a wizard physically while inflicting the pain mentally.
He only cast it once. The sight of his unfortunate attacker's rigid, writhing, silent scream of agony was too much for him. He hadn't known a face could look that way, could hold so much emotion - so much torment. And he had no countercurse, no way to alter the spell's duration. The man lay there, helplessly silent, until something broke in him. Harry watched the life fade from his tortured eyes, then was promptly sick all over the alley.
The Unforgivables may be terrible, but they were tame compared to what could be done with the knowledge and power Harry had accrued. He vowed then and there to only use his knowledge for himself, never to share it with anyone not bound with magical oaths to protect the knowledge, and certainly not to sell it on the open market in order to earn enough to travel back in time again.
Back to the drawing board.
July came to an end before he created another usable spell; this one a healing charm of much greater potency and effective against magically-inflicted injuries in a way no other spell he'd heard of or found could.
That he could sell on the open market.
Unfortunately, the Ministry restrictions on new spells, powerful spells, and untested spells created enough paperwork for anyone attempting to go legitimate with their creation, Harry's only customers were Dark and unscrupulous.
They didn't pay very well.
August drew nearer its close, and Harry desperately tried to perfect his silent expelliarmus, his rapid imperio, and his most stable disillusio, accepting that he wouldn't be able to loop back for a third try.
He saw his past self scrawling unrefined circles next door, trying to figure out the time travel ritual. It embarrassed him how ignorant he'd been back then. Had he not even picked up a basic arithmancy book before starting? The leftmost arm was clearly off by at least seven degrees, and the central decagram needed to be shifted to the right.
He ignored it for days, but Harry 1 made no move to fix it, and finally he couldn't stand it any longer. He reframed the circle properly, adding in a couple stabilization runes for good measure, then returned to his own - much more refined and complex - magical circle to continue his final preparations.
It was a relief to stop worrying about his past self running around being an idiot. It felt like much longer than two months; returning to life at the Dursleys - even for only a few days - was like a return to another world entirely.
Harry hadn't realized how much he'd missed Hedwig's company, crashing in Dudley's room and spending his days in a dark flat down a scummy alley or testing spells in an even scummier one. It helped lighten his spirit to have her back on his shoulder, helped alleviate - if never completely erase - the darker edges of who he'd become during those secret, stolen months.
As he carefully and precisely packed up his belongings, tucking his Darkest equipment and books away in an invisible extension circle under his bed for safekeeping, he reflected on everything he'd done and what he'd learned.
He'd decided to officially take up Sirius's legacy, as the alternative would be handing it over to the Lestranges or the Malfoys, neither of whom would give a proper showing to the one person who had ever unequivocally cared for Harry.
Just the thought of how much Sirius had sacrificed for Harry made him furious and sad all over again. So when his official Hogwarts ticket arrived printed 'Harry James Potter-Black' he thought it only fitting that the magical world acknowledged his choice.
Then August ended, and September 1st arrived.
Sick of putting up with the world, he strode onto the train with his head held high, unwilling to be seen as anything less than himself. His cloak of protective enchantments forcefully pushed away anyone coming too close, and anyone with a modicum of natural talent would be able to sense the power pouring off him.
Hermione's attempted hug was rebuffed, and Harry belatedly realized he hadn't built in an exception for his friends. Ron, trying for a comradely shoulder slap, found himself sprawled against the back of the compartment.
"Sorry," Harry said, pulling out the shrunken parchment on which he'd placed the ritual bindings for the protective enchantment. "It's a bit touchy right now."
Hermione snatched it away the moment Harry set it on the floor, squinting at it with her brow furrowed. "Harry, this is really advanced. Did you do this yourself?"
Harry reclaimed the ritual and corrected a few lines, adding a protected sphere outside, and hastily sketched in Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Luna, and Neville as trusted entities. The ritual burned a moment as he fed extra power into it through his hand. Then the enchantment relaxed, allowing Ron to sit down beside Harry properly without being smashed into the window.
"So, how did you do?" Ron asked with forced cheer.
Harry stared at him, uncomprehending.
"You O.W.L.s, he means," said Hermione.
"Oh. I don't remember. I've got them in here somewhere." He rummaged through his bag, producing the slightly-crumpled page. "Only failed useless Divinations and History," he said, passing it over.
"Top marks in Defence! I knew you'd get it," Ron said.
Hermione's face fell as she glanced down the sheet. "Oh, Harry. I'm sorry."
"Sorry?"
"You needed O to get into Snape's N.E.W.T. class for Potions."
"And?"
"Well," she glanced at Ron, looking somewhat awkward. "You wanted to become an Auror, didn't you?"
Harry supposed he had, once, when he'd imagined he had more time than a single year. He shrugged. "It doesn't matter now, does it? I just need to learn whatever I can, and I don't need Snivillus to teach me. I'm doing just fine on my own."
Ron leaned forward, now that the obligatory school-related talk was, technically, out of the way.
"What did Dumbledore want?"
Harry frowned. That was the problem with living a second, isolated life for months on end; one tended to forget mundane things like correspondences.
"Sorry?"
"He said he'd be talking to you and, if all went well, you'd come stay with us."
Harry vaguely remembered being invited to depart early with Dumbledore. He'd declined, satisfied with his progress and unwilling to allow the disruption to his ritual studies that a visit to the Burrow would have inevitably caused.
As much as he wanted to hang out with his friends, he was living on a timer now. He couldn't afford to waste the little time he'd had free of Minstry or teacher supervision on something as trivial as visiting Ron.
"Oh, that. I was pretty busy this summer, so I told him no."
Ron nearly choked. "You turned down a chance to go off on some mysterious venture with Dumbledore?!"
"Is that why you weren't at the Burrow either?" Hermione asked.
"Yeah. Busy." He gestured to his bag, where he'd replaced the ritual circle. "I figure now Voldemort's back-" Ron flinched. "Oh, honestly. Now he's not hiding, I need to be prepared for an attack at any time."
"I could have helped, if you'd told me. I know the eighteen layouts by heart."
"I didn't think of applying arithmancy until last week, and by then it was too late to involve you."
Hermione gaped at him. "You went from non-arithmantic circles to that in under a week?!"
"Well, more or less." One week, and two months.
Ron scowled. "No wonder you were too busy to visit."
"Ronald, don't be jealous. I think it's very important to protect yourself, Harry. You've done an amazing job."
Harry felt a momentary flash of guilt. Excusing his darker research had been so much easier when living among those whose day-to-day survival could be shattered by a Death Eater attack at any moment. Here, with bright lights, clean floors, and chatting friends, Harry's descent into obsessive study regardless of morality felt almost like a betrayal.
He brushed away the thought. He'd come too far to falter now.
"Are you alright?" Hermione asked, more quietly. "After. . . everything that happened."
She meant Sirius; the Department of Mysteries; the confrontation with Voldemort; his weakness fighting Bellatrix.
"Yes," said Harry. "I'm alright."
And he had a few things to say to people, things he should have said years ago.
He sat up abruptly as he saw Draco Malfoy swagger past, his two cronies and a gang of Slytherin girls following.
Starting right now.
He stood, but Hermione grabbed his hand before he could take two steps.
"Harry, no! Leave him. He's just a—"
"I'm not putting up with the likes of him tainting my school any more." Harry continued forward, pulling himself sharply from her grasp.
"No, Harry, you can't—"
He stalked out into the corridor and slammed the compartment door behind himself. Malfoy's comeuppance was well overdue.
The moment Harry left, Ron and Hermione stared at each other.
"Something's wrong," said Hermione. Her voice shook. "We should talk to Professor McGonagall."
"No way," Ron protested. "Harry's got enough to deal with. We don't need to go ratting on him to a teacher."
"That is not Harry!" Hermione's voice grew shrill. "He didn't know a decagram from a triangle three months ago, and now he's whipping out perfect spell circles - working spells too, not just theoretical ones! - and modifying them in moments like it's nothing?"
"Well, I dunno." Ron scratched his head. "I've seen a lot of diagrams like that in your books, Hermione. I think you're overreacting. He could have just copied it down."
A loud bang shook the train, followed by a brief burst of unnerving, near-hysterical laughter.
Hermione stood up. "I'm going out there."
Ron grabbed her sleeve. "Don't. He has to do this."
"This is my fault," Hermione said, tears beginning to well up in her eyes. She collapsed back onto the seat. "If I'd tried harder to connect with him over the summer, if I hadn't tried to give him space, we could have. . ."
"Could have what? Sirius is dead, Hermione! I remember when I almost lost my dad, and he actually came home in the end. You've never lost anyone. You can't imagine what that's like!"
"Oh, Ron, don't," Hermione wailed. "I cared about Sirius too."
"Not like Harry. You had your own family. I have mine. Who does he have? His relatives are swine."
Another shudder down the train, this accompanied by a sharp, electric crack!
"We have to stop him, Ron, this is wrong. I don't care how much he's grieving, Malfoy can't help who his family is."
Ron pounded one fist into the seat beside him. "Malfoy deserves everything he gets," he snarled. "You know what he's like. He's a terrible, petty bully who can't wait to grow up into an evil, manipulative snake like his precious Death Eater father. I wish Harry had tried to knock some sense into him years ago."
"I can't stand this," Hermione said, wiping her face on her sleeve and rising to her feet. "Someone has to put a stop to it."
Ron didn't try to hold her back this time.
She'd expected to see the corridor in shambles, half-imagined Draco lying against the wall with his wand snapped and hands pleading for Harry to stop.
What Harry would be actually doing to their longtime adversary, she couldn't imagine. And that scared her more than anything. She'd known Harry, known who he was, what he was capable of, where his lines were.
Now, she didn't have the faintest idea. How could someone possibly have changed so much in so little time?
Draco, though, was more capable than she'd anticipated. He and Harry stood face to face, wands almost touching each other's chest. Harry's robes were rumpled, and she saw a scorched strip of parchment on the ground which looked quite similar to his protection circle.
She put a hand over her mouth and drew her wand with the other. Harry was the one facing her. His eyes flicked to her briefly, then along the corridor without changing expression the least bit.
Her heart pounded, her wand-hand trembled. She aimed in the general direction of the dueling boys, unsure which she was actually targeting.
"You're dead, Potter!" Draco shrieked. "You know that, right? You and your whole stupid Order, dead."
"No," Harry snarled, his own emotions clearly just as hot as Draco's, "I'm going to win. I'm never going to back down, never going to give way. You and your Death Eater pals, your time on the top is done. I'm not going to stop until the world is free and safe from Voldemort and everyone who ever followed him."
Quick gasps of indrawn breath alerted Hermione to the fact that, though the corridor was empty but for her and the boys, their duel was not unobserved. Compartment doors were cracked, faces pressed against windows.
That was enough to calm her. If there were this many witnesses, neither of them would do anything stupid. Surely not.
Her mind insisted that this must be true; her body kept her wand trained steadily on Harry. Malfoy cared too much about reputation. Harry, this new Harry. . . she had no idea what he'd do. Only once before had she heard his voice so raw with emotion, and this fury scared her like nothing else. At least Malfoy seemed aware of the absurdity of their situation. Harry's face betrayed no glimmer of mercy, no hint of levity. He seemed deadly intent.
Hermione had never seen anyone look so cold and so furious at the same time. She'd never imagined anything Harry did would fill her with such dread.
She took a step back as his power sharpened in the air, an instinctive reaction. Before she could think it through, a faint crackle sounded through the air and Harry lunged forward, planting his free hand against Draco's chest.
"Protego!" Draco shouted, but not quickly enough. His shield only caught the sizzling blast of power from the inside, echoing it back into his face and throwing him down the corridor.
Hermione leapt back as he landed by her feet.
Harry smiled. "You know what he thinks of you. You remember how his evil little friends treat you. He's all yours."
Hermione took another step back. "Harry, that's enough. You've made your point! Please."
"Stupefy!" Draco shrieked, firing off a jet of red light. It splashed off the air around Harry, dissipating harmlessly.
Harry frowned, stalking toward his fallen adversary. Draco scrambled backward, raising his wand as he scurried to take shelter behind Hermione.
Hermione would have laughed, had the situation been any less tense, but now her voice trembled. "Really?"
"He's a coward, just like his father." Harry sneered. "What kind of Death Eater are you, hiding behind a mudblood?"
Hermione's breath caught. She'd thought herself immune to pureblood insults. The Slytherins certainly made free enough with them. But to hear Harry say it, it broke something she hadn't realized existed.
"Im—"
"Stupefy," Hermione whispered, and his protection did not stop her spell.
'Harry' didn't even have time to look betrayed as he crumpled to the ground, unconscious.
Author's notes:
I had so much fun with this prompt. I wrote the entire thing in one sitting, basically. Of course, it's got my trademarked Not Quite What You Meant spin on it; different timeframe, more dark-leaning than grey, and since I haven't read very many independent!Harry fics, I'm not sure exactly which tropes are expected. But it was fun! And that's all that really matters. :-3
4-8-19: Minor edit to repair a few broken sentences, fixed a typo, reworded a few things.