Brother

DO NOT READ IF YOU WANT TO READ STUFF THAT MAKES SENSE

So, before I get back to writing either "A Change of Villains" or "The True Story", I thought it would be wise to get a couple of bunnies off my mind – or at least into the memory stack till I access it again. It should be patently obvious as this one progresses that there won't be any pairings, though I am veering towards Honks, simply for its potential for humour.

There should have been a warning. Why the bloody hell was there no effing warning? If he'd known then he'd not have even bothered with the stone, or he'd have actually broken and tossed the damn wand away. But NO! He was Harry-bloody-Potter, and he was Murphy's muse when he wrote that damn law. And his friends and family were absolutely useless at helping him – actually useless. They were damn hindrances. Whenever his state changed, and if it was appropriate, Molly, Ginny (she was his girlfriend, damn it!), Hermione (unable to find a solution in the absence of a library; not that it'd have helped, since she didn't even know of the Hallows before) and whichever other girl/woman was present would start cooing over him.

Ron and the other Weasley brothers started treating him like a kid, as they had treated Ron years before.

Teddy found him an acceptable playmate. It felt weird, being a baby and having his entire set of memories but still wanting nothing more than for Padfoot to turn into a dog.

The bloody side-effect of being the freaking Master of Death was that he was de-aging randomly, for random durations and to random ages much less than his own. Apparently, if he never did grow old – or worse, as he now realised, grew younger – how was he ever supposed to reach his old age and die?

Ginny really hadn't been best pleased when her attempts at kissing him while he was eighteen temporarily got her a question about "lurgies and cooties" – thankfully only a scant few seconds before he turned into a nine-year-old. Then she had burst into laughter, and what should have been a magnificent snogging session turned into a torture session where he got his cheeks pulled.

Stupid Hallows. Stupid Master of Death. Stupid Death.

As it was, he was currently a broody fifteen while he was sulking behind a tree in the Weasley orchard. The good thing about being a teenager – younger than eighteen that is – was that nobody actually came to look for him. Sarcastic responses, grunts and such were not the most enchanting conversation aids. Then again, this spot could be seen from some of the windows.

Then there was a splitting headache as he receded to an age even younger – on the precipice of teenage.

That was bloody great, wasn't it?

A great surge of fear and terror overwhelmed him for a scant few seconds, before he felt the same sort of resignation he had felt as went into the forest for what he thought was the last moment of his life. Damn it. This thing wasn't natural. Another bloody side-effect, this feeling something that he had no real reason to feel. A few minutes later, he felt ridiculously light and happy, and then just as suddenly, he reverted to his eighteen-year-old self.

"Grrrraahhhharrr," he shouted out in frustration. Of course, it was supposed to be a growl, but as usual, it didn't end up right and ended up being a shout instead.

He'd had bloody enough of this. Whatever this was, it was caused by the thrice-damned Hallows. He was going to find out. So he held out the Elder Wand (the "protector" of the wand as he now was; cursed, more like) and summoned the Cloak and the Stone. He really should have thought better of this. He had never actively assumed all three Hallows simultaneously.

Hermione, who had seen Harry from the window, turning back to his normal self, and was hurrying out to call him in, only had time to be startled and call out his name as he vanished in a swirl of colours.

"What the bloody hell?" Harry shouted out to nobody.

"That's for calling me stupid," an aggravated gravelly whisper sounded out around him.

"Of course," Harry sarcastically retorted as he realised quite instantly. "Death, you bloody git, how are you?"

"Deathly," the entity replied. "I suppose saying that I am fine would be very antithetical to my meaning."

Harry had the distinct feeling that he was being leered at by some large predator.

"Isn't it enough that I have been in nothing but trouble all my life? Why don't you let me be?" he cried irritably.

"I neither asked those idiotic ancestors of yours to ask me for those gifts, nor did I ask you to collect them. They did. And you did. Now you have to bear the consequences."

"Growing younger and younger?" demanded Harry incredulously.

"Yes."

"Feeling stuff that I have no chance of having any relation to?"

"Yes. But you do have some relation to those...feelings."

"Please. Be direct."

"Fine. There are several parallel universes that have you in one form or the other. Your different ages and the different things you feel are what some Harry or Harry-like person in some universe is feeling at the moment."

"That's..." there were several less than polite words that he could summon but in the end he tamely settled for "ridiculous."

"It's not my problem," Death replied unconcernedly.

"How do you choose one of possibly many Harry's of the same age?"

"I don't. It is a matter of chance."

Harry was silent for a while. "Well, I suppose that was a nice joke. But I must move on..."

"To where you choose?"

"To where I choose?"

"You could choose to go back. Or you could choose to help the most recent Harry."

"Yeah, sure," Harry replied flippantly. "Let me humour you, then."

The blackness engulfed him instantly...

...and he woke up in the Chamber of Secrets to a Ginny and a younger redhead boy. What the hell?

He surely had spoken that aloud, for the older – now he could see that, because the Ginny-person was taller – one turned around with her wand pointed at him.

"Who are you?" she harshly demanded.

So, there was no time for acclimatisation or anything like that. That was the norm for him anyway.

"I am Harry Potter?"

"That's impossible!" screamed the young girl, who, Harry realised with some trepidation looked to be around twelve. She was backing away slowly – till Fawkes cried out a soothing tune, and settled upon his shoulder.

The girl looked at him oddly. Evidently Fawkes was good here as well.

"I swear I am Harry Potter, son of Lily Evans-Potter and James Potter, and I think, unless I am hallucinating, that I am in a parallel universe."

The boy was clearly out of it. Well, first things first, Harry decided to keep the redhead boy as safe as he could be. He was sent under a quick sleeping spell and even before he collapsed, the floor was covered with a cushioning charm. And he explained things as he did it.

Given that the girl, who was definitely not a Ginny – she didn't look like any of the Weasleys at all, but instead like his, Harry's mum, with hazel eyes – had her wand out, was wielding a tattered book, and there was a basilisk in the background, Harry immediately built a picture that was...troubling to say the least.

"You are a Potter aren't you? Perhaps you are the Girl-Who-Lived or something?" Confirmation was always a good thing. "That is a Weasley, and" what followed was a shot in the dark, but well, "is the first Weasley boy in many decades?"

"Yes to everything else, but no to the Weasley thing," the girl answered curtly. "Do you even know how impossible that would be?"

In retrospect, it was impossible. If there was no Weasley boy in several generations, how could there be a Weasley?

"I see that you understand now," the girl went on. "You are a bit dim, aren't you?"

Fawkes stopped singing and gave what was definitely a chortle.

"Hey!" protested Harry. "You don't know what I've been through! I am allowed some stupidity."

"You don't know what..."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Harry cut her off lazily. "There was a boy in a diary, the young Voldemort, who was a parselmouth, who possessed young Mr. Red here, who set a basilisk upon the school; but you are a parselmouth too, so you were suspected; then a best friend is attacked and this one is taken down; you were bitten by the dead snake over there, nearly died, but our dear old firebird saved you with his tears and here we are. Right. I have been there and done that."

The girl looked at him oddly. "You're wrong about the diary and the boy," and there was definite anger in the girl's voice as she spoke of the boy, "but right about everything else."

"Alright, better fill me in."

"That boy is Lady Veuve Noire's son. The mystery of how one of Mr. Prewett's brothers was killed has been solved."

"Lady who whose what with whom?"

"The Veuve Noire's son, presumably with Mr. Prewett's brother" the girl repeated irritably.

At this point, even Fawkes' singing couldn't control the sheer terror that Harry felt. If Snape was a woman here and James Potter was Jamie or something and the two had gotten over a catfight over Lillian Evans, he was getting out of this bloody parallel universe. He was anyway blocking the image of a male Molly.

"Who exactly was Veuve Noire?"

"She was the worst Dark Lady in eons. She went about bearing children with powerful wizards and killed the Wizards and the children became her followers and avatars. Every child keeps her alive. She is said to have over twenty five of these monsters."

Was Voldemort's female version serially breeding good enough a reason to puke? Perhaps even Tom would share his disgust?

"Your name? Your parents?"

"Julia Potter, only daughter of James Potter and Lily Evans," the girl snapped.

"You get told that you look like..."

"...my mum, but have my father's eyes?" completed the girl. "Yes."

"Who's your Potions teacher?"

"Professor Elena Prince."

Fawkes squawked and flew out as Harry projectile vomited. Snape pining for his mum was bad enough. A female Snape pining for his dad...Harry shuddered, swayed like an inebriated man, and then, like an inebriated man, passed out and fell into his own vomit.

"Eww," Julia commented with a scrunched face, before reviving him.

Harry curled into the foetal position and whimpered.

"Do you like lying in your own vomit?"

"It's better than facing the world, sometimes."

On balance, Julia decided, it was a true enough statement.

"You have to though."

Harry whimpered some more. He had a one more confirmation to make. "I suppose you have an Uncle Patrick and Aunt Veronica, and a cousin Delia or something?"

"Wrong about the cousin, she is Dorothy, but right about the rest of the Evanses."

"She was Veronica Dursley first, wasn't she?"

"Yes."

"Are you happy with them? You can tell me honestly, because I hated Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon and cousin Dudley."

"I have no choice. It was good till gran lived with us, but she died five years ago."

"Whoever placed you there..." Harry swallowed some bile as he imagined Alberta Dumbledore, "said that you were safe there?"

"Yeah."

"I promise you I can clean up myself and everything, and I have defeated my Dark Lord, who was a very good person compared to your Wow Noire..."

"Veuve Noire," Julia corrected half-heartedly.

"Yes her," Harry grunted as he imagined an alliance between him and Voldemort to defeat this insult to the entirely decent human being Tom was. "I have defeated me version of her. And if I can prove that I am your closest living relative, would you like an older brother?"

"Do I get to torment you?"

"You can't do anything worse than my own imagination does, so try, little girl, but don't be disappointed if you fail miserably."

Julia couldn't help but grin.

Elena Prince, the Head of Slytherin, turned out not to be the problem at all. She was their mother's best friend but that was about it. It was, instead, Penelope Pettigrew, the local universe's charms mistress and, thankfully, not the Head of Ravenclaw. If she was a Death Eater analogue who told Wow Noire the prophecy, she was dying horribly. Harry dreaded the Alberta Dumbledore already. A female Filius Flitwick, a male McGonagall and others were all prospects that made him shudder. This universe was all wrong. Thankfully, while Maxwell McGonagall was a strict Transfiguration master, Albert Dumbledore – neither Albus nor Alberta - and Filius Flitwick were as normal as he could hope. This he could work with. Statistically, it seemed, about a third of all people he knew had the right plumb...er...genders.

Then something truly horrible crossed his mind. What were Remus and Sirius here? That was a question that made him want to pass out again. And if Julia was friends with a male Hermione and a female Ron or someone like that, then it would be terrible. Horrible.

"Fuck you, Death," Harry softly swore.

This Universe was not done giving him shocks. Lucia Black, and Nostradamus Black, had a son Draco Black. Why the fuck ever? And Julia seemed to be enamoured of the git the same way his old Hermione was of Ron. Alright. He would accept many things. But his female self was bloody well not crushing on Malfoy or his analogue. That's what big brothers were for...wait a damn minute.

He was the big brother here. He got to take care of Julia. He could scare off boys. He could control things – well most of them anyway. The rest of the things? Well it seemed as if the Universe was particularly detested as it didn't seem to have much of Marauderdom. Here he was, the Master of Death, destined to remedy it.

Julia wondered whether she'd not been too hasty when she found her dimensional analogue cackling madly. She had that dark, dark feeling that she was going to regret this.

The good thing about the whole fiasco was that it indeed was Lucia who had slipped the Diary which would wake up her Mistress' son. Feminist Death Eaters. Great. As if just being Death Eaters was not enough without them screaming "Girl Power." Of course, since he had to live with his sister, he was wise enough to not voice that thought. Hermione and Ginny had cured him of the affliction which caused his mouth to speak whatever his brain thought.

With the cloak donned, he turned the parents into Lucius and Narcissa, so at least it was easy to torment them. Then a large neon signboard appeared above them. "The fucking bastards who slipped a diary to murder children. Do not allow such monsters around children." Then little Draco had a sudden wet spot on his trousers and a small tap on his shoulders which caused him to shriek. This was just the teaser. If this didn't disabuse Julia of any stupid thoughts, there would be escalation. Best not to threaten and have a Draco/Julia situation where she would not listen to him and go off with the little shit instead.

"Did you have to do it?" Julia hissed in embarrassment, as Harry left with her to check places to live in the castle for the night before presenting himself before the local Dumbledore and claim guardianship.

"Obviously," Harry replied. "I know how you have a little girly crush on him. Now I don't care if that's someone safe, whom I can torment and yet be a bit sure of, but murderous scoundrels and their spawn? No. I might make him hate you."

"You are horrible!"

"That comes with the big brother territory, Jules." Yes. She had to have a nickname.

"Don't call me Jules."

"Not Jules? Okay, how about Watt?"

She gave him an aggravated glare.

"Alright, Jules it is. No changes."

"I hate you."

"Yes. I think I might grow to love you too, little sister."

Julia knew she was right. She was going to regret this.

Don't flame me. If after the warning you still read, it's your damn fault.