The Potter Ultimatum

Summary: Janet Bourne is starting to get her memories back - memories that include a gangly red-headed boy with a rat and a bushy-haired girl waving a stick in the air. Memories that include her and other kids doing utterly impossible things that can't be real, can they? Who is she, really, and what happened to her? FemHarry (Violet Potter).

Crossover: Harry Potter/Bourne Movies

Pairing: Undecided

A/N: I love the Bourne movies (at least the ones with Matt Damon), and I loved the Bourne books when I was younger. I think this story has real potential, but I won't seriously look at continuing it until at least seeing the next movie, and possibly after rereading the original trilogy again. My inclination is to make this a Violet/Nicky story, with the two of them trying to recapture what they briefly had in Paris, possibly alongside returning memories of Violet having a bit of a crush on Hermione back in school while Hermione works to teach Violet magic again. So, lots of personal drama alongside political drama and dangers - that's a big reason why I think this has potential.

It would also be the only Harry Potter/Bourne crossover here!

As always, thanks to Bonnie for not only reading this and improving on the original, but also for her help in developing the plot so far.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, JK Rowling does. I don't own the Bourne characters, Robert Ludlum's estate and Universal Pictures do.

Chapter 01 - Extreme Memories

CIA Deep Cover Anti-Terrorism Bureau, 104 West 40th Street, New York City.

"Pamela Landy speaking."

"I hear you're still looking for me."

"Bourne?" She grabbed Janet Bourne's file from the stack on her desk, painfully aware of how thin it was.

"What do you want?"

"I wanted to thank you... for what you did. For the tape. And for not taking things into your own hands when you had the chance. It's over now, and I owe you an apology."

"Is that official?"

"No. Off the record. You know how these things are. But speaking for myself, personally, I am sorry. I made assumptions and overreacted." There was an unusually long pause at the other end, and Landy was about to say something else before Bourne finally responded.

"Fine. Goodbye."

"Wait. Wait. Potter. That's your real name, Violet Potter." Landy looked down at the top paper with Bourne's photo and what little personal information they'd apparently been able to gather back when she joined Treadstone. Even then, she'd been an enigma. Landy focused briefly on the woman's birthday, July 31, 1981, and made a split-second decision. "You were born 4-15-81 in Godric's Hollow, Great Britain." She paused for a moment as she considered how little anyone at the CIA had ever known about Potter or her background. "I'd like it if you came in so we can talk about the information we have on you. Your history. I'd like to help, if I can. I owe you that, too. Bourne?"

"Get some rest, Pam. You look tired."

Landy spun around in her seat, eyes wide as she looked out through the wall of glass behind her and at the skyscrapers beyond. She's here... she's right here, and she's been watching me!

She turned back and once more looked down at a file she'd long since memorized. There was something about it that bothered her, though she hadn't been able to quite put her finger on why. The more she'd studied it, the more certain she'd become that Potter had concealed something significant about her background when she joined the program.

What were you hiding? Why did they even accept you when they knew so little about you?

She slapped the file closed, knowing that she wouldn't find any more answers there. The puzzle simply had far too many missing pieces. She'd laid out her bait and now had to wait to see if she could get more pieces that way. Abruptly standing, she grabbed her coat and pulled it on. "Bourne's here, somewhere," she finally said to her assistant, Tom Cronin, who'd been waiting there patiently the entire time. "I'm going to go out and hope that she'll contact me."

"What was that thing with the date, though?"

"The training center," Landy explained. "If Bourne doesn't contact me, she'll go there."

Tom grimaced in anticipation of being put on trial for treason, but gamely pressed on. "Want me to come with you?"

"No, she's more likely to contact me if I'm alone. I want you here to keep an eye on things. Call me if anything happens." She left without waiting for a response and was soon on the street in front of her building. She stood in the bustling sidewalk for a few long moments, only then realizing that she hadn't had a plan beyond getting out of her office. It had been a good plan... but now what?

That was when her phone buzzed, and she received a text from Bourne, demanding a meeting. She didn't hesitate to flag down a cab, which whisked her away before she could see the men who came running out of the building, scrambling into cars to get there ahead of her.

Janet Bourne descended the steps two and three at a time as she returned her equipment to her bag. She slowed briefly as she considered what she'd just learned. The date was surely a code of some sort, one which she'd have to figure out later, but the name... "Violet Potter?" she whispered. "Violet Potter." She paused in her descent and said the names slowly, tasting the syllables as if they were an unfamiliar food. There was something warm, even comforting, about them.

"Who am I?" she asked as she stared at her reflection in a window, repeating a question she'd asked herself a thousand times in a dozen different languages.

"My name is Violet Potter."

And it was. Somehow, she knew it was. Landy had told her the truth, confirming her decision to trust the woman. Or trust her as much as she'd ever trust anyone working for the CIA.

Pain erupted behind her eyes and she had to lean against the wall to steady herself as a memory flashed in her mind. She was in a train compartment with two children - a boy with red hair and a girl with bushy brown hair - saying to them, "Hi, I'm Violet Potter." It was her voice, yet not. It sounded... British, for some strange reason.

She pressed her fingers against her eyes in an effort to drive away the pain. She was used to memory flashes, but this was only the second time she'd had one from her childhood. At least, she assumed it was her childhood, judging from her relative size and squeaky voice. The first hit immediately after Landy had apologized, overwhelming her with an image of a gangly boy with red hair - possibly the same one, though a bit older - trying to apologize for something. These new memories seemed to confirm her identity, especially coming as they did after learning her name, but their timing was damned inconvenient.

Shaking her head and berating herself for getting distracted, she quickened her pace again and soon emerged on the street. Looking around the corner, she saw Landy standing outside the CIA building, as expected. A press of a button sent the prepared text, and less than a minute later Landy was gone, several government cars following along. Bourne crossed the street, hidden in the crowd, and entered the same building which the others had just exited. She had files to steal - files that would hopefully allow her to destroy the people who dared chase and threaten her.

They'd have been safe if they'd only left her alone, but if they wanted to make war on her, she'd damn well make war right back. And she'd win.

Bourne probably shouldn't have been surprised that breaking into Noah Vosen's personal safe wouldn't be so easy. Had the man simply cooperated and answered the phone with his full name, she'd have all his dirty little secrets and be on her way out of the building already. Instead he simply answered with a curt "Vosen," leaving her without any means for getting through the voice lock on his safe.

It probably hadn't been wise to taunt him by saying that if he'd been in his office, they'd be having their conversation face-to-face. She hadn't been able to help herself - he simply pissed her off too much. Now, though, she was almost out of time and didn't know what to do.

She stared at the safe for several moments, wishing for a way to unlock it. She was about to give up and call the op a loss when another memory flash hit. She was with those two kids again, and the red-haired boy was pounding on a heavy wooden door. It was locked, and they needed to get out. She felt scared. There was a threat nearby, but she couldn't see it. The bushy-haired girl pulled the boy aside, waved a stick at the lock, and said, "Alohamora!" The door clicked open, allowing them to run through, and she barely caught a glimpse of a giant three-headed dog as they slammed the door closed again.

Bourne blinked a couple of times, unable to believe what she'd just seen. She was accustomed to memory flashes that were too disjointed or had too little context to be understood, but this was the first time she'd remembered something that was impossible. For some reason, though, it also felt right. She focused on the safe again and said, "Alohamora."

Nothing happened. Do I need a stick or something? she wondered.

"Alohamora!" she said again, a bit louder this time.

Still nothing happened.

Getting desperate and keenly feeling the need to get at whatever dirt Vosen was hiding in there, she knelt in front of the safe, placed both hands on it, and whispered strongly, "Alohamora!"

Her heart skipped a beat as she heard the locks click and the door swung open. She didn't pause to think about how unbelievable that was - she simply grabbed all the files out of the safe and stuffed them in her bag as she hurried out of the room.

She hadn't even reached the end of the hall before she heard distant gunshots. Vosen had alerted his people. They were coming.

She was being hunted again.

But she was a predator herself and knew how to hunt, too. While looking for Vosen's office, she'd figured out Landy's coded message, so she had a target as well. Or a location, at least, and she hoped her target would be there. An older man with a deep voice whom she'd seen in several of her worst memory flashes from what she assumed was her early training in Treadstone.

He'd pushed her to do unspeakable things. She really, really wanted to have a chat with him.

Crawley, Great Britain.

Hermione Granger blew on her drink before taking a careful sip, enjoying afternoon tea with her parents. She didn't often get a chance to spend time with them during the week like this and was relishing it all the more because of that. A casual glance to the stack of newspapers on the coffee table revealed the day's edition of the Guardian, its front page emblazoned with a story about one of their own star reporters being murdered in the middle of Waterloo Station. She picked it up and idly skimmed the article, not having heard about the incident in the wizarding press.

"It's so terrible, what happened to that poor man," her mother said. "It's been all over the news."

"It's like something you'd expect to see in a movie," her father chimed in.

As Hermione read, she learned that Simon Ross had been investigating someone named Janet Bourne, an alleged CIA assassin who was believed to have been involved in the reporter's death and was being sought for questioning. She flipped the paper over to continue reading and gasped. Her teacup tumbled from her fingers, spilling hot liquid all over the floor.

"Hermione!" her father exclaimed in alarm. "What's the matter?"

Her hands trembled as she slowly set the paper in her lap. One finger traced the lines of a grainy image of a woman with black hair and wearing a baseball cap. According to the caption, it was a still taken from a surveillance camera at Waterloo Station and was believed to be Janet Bourne, right after Ross' assassination.

"Violet," she whispered.

New York City.

While Hermione Granger was thinking about her long-lost friend, that same friend was grimacing in pain as she experienced another memory flash of a bushy-haired girl waving a stick around. "It's LeviOHsa, not LeviohSA!" the girl was saying this time. Her bossy, condescending tone was almost enough to make Bourne's headache worse, but she had far more important things to worry about.

Her pistol was empty and she was currently taking cover behind a car in a parking garage. If there had been one or two opponents, she would have simply gotten in close and taken them out. Instead, she was facing four of them, all well-armed and well-trained. Too many to eliminate that way in a relatively open area. She didn't have much time to come up with an alternative, either, because soon one or more would move to flank her, cutting off her remaining exits.

She had been wishing for a way to eliminate their cover and send them running when the memory hit her. The last time she'd been hit with a memory of that little girl, she was wishing for a way to get into a locked safe - and the memory had provided her with the means for doing so.

Not having any better ideas, she peeked around the edge of the car, stretched out one hand, and whispered, "Wingardium Leviosa!" The car which the four gunmen were taking cover behind seemed to rock slightly, and the shooting paused. Feeling emboldened, she said with a bit more force, "Wingardium Leviosa!" This time the car definitely rocked. She was still certain that this was completely impossible, but she was also just as certain that it would work.

For some reason, the phrase "swish and flick" kept intruding on her concentration, but she ignored it so she could place all of her focus on the car.

"Wingardium Leviosa!"

The car weighed over a thousand pounds, but it lifted up off the concrete as if it were a feather and tumbled slowly in the air towards the CIA operatives behind it. They all scurried away, shouting in surprise and fear. The car suddenly fell to the ground with a crash just as a police cruiser arrived, disgorging two NYPD officers who rushed to arrest the injured and confused men.

Janet Bourne had always been extraordinarily lucky, getting out of situations with few or no injuries when most operatives would have died several times over. Marie had concluded that it was Janet's specialized training, combined with an almost inhuman focus on getting a job done, which allowed her to survive and excel in so many deadly situations. But maybe Marie had been wrong? Janet Bourne was certainly well-trained and lucky, but there was clearly something more going on with Violet Potter. Something impossible, yet also real.

She chose to save that line of thinking for later and dove for the open door of the police cruiser. She needed a fast exit, and the police had unwittingly presented her with one.

415 West 81st Street, New York City.

"I was wondering when you'd arrive."

She barely kept her rage under control as she aimed her pistol at the head of the man she blamed for who and what she was. Based on the fragments of memory that had returned to her so far, he had been in charge of the program that had turned her into this. It had all been his idea, and he had personally been involved in every step of her training.

Torture and dehumanization would have been more accurate labels.

"I've been following your career with some interest," Dr. Hirsch continued. Every word he spoke grated on her nerves. His calm, smug attitude only served to make her angrier. "Though these past couple of weeks have been particularly exciting. Dark and difficult, yes, but exciting."

She squeezed her eyes in pain as another forgotten memory hit. This time, instead of kids, she saw an old man with a large nose and an impossibly long beard looking sadly at her over half-moon glasses. He was admitting to sentencing her to several dark and difficult years. He had some excuse that she didn't understand and doubted she'd accept even now.

Bourne shook her head so she could focus on the here and now, then looked questioningly at the man currently in front of her, trying to imagine him with a long beard.

"Is something wrong?" he asked, seeming to pick up on her confusion.

"Why did you do it?" she demanded.

"Do what?"

"You know! This! Me!"

"So, it is indeed all coming back to you," he said as he pulled out an ID card and used it to open the door behind him. "I was afraid of that," he added softly as he entered the room, completely ignoring the pistol she was holding to his head.

"Well?" she asked.

"This is where it all began," he explained, gesturing with one hand around a room that she recognized from her returning memories. Memories of brutality and death. "This is where we first talked. Where I explained the program to you."

"But why me?" she interrupted. "Why did you bring me here in the first place?"

He frowned for a moment before replying, "You came to us, wanting to forget your past. To forget who you were. You told me you never wanted to hear your name again. You eagerly volunteered when I explained that once you signed up, everything about you, everything you were, would be so completely suppressed that Violet Potter would forever cease to exist."

She gaped in surprise, and the pistol wavered slightly. I expected him to be a monster who had kidnapped me so he could turn me into a soulless killer, but if I actually volunteered... if I actually came into this willingly, with my eyes open...

He smiled now, as if he took pleasure from her distress. "Most candidates balked at the prospect of becoming a weapon against our enemies, regardless of how committed they were to saving lives, but for some reason that never bothered you. I always wondered about that. More than once I wanted to ask what happened to you that would make you so resigned to becoming a tool, a weapon against terrorists and other villains, but in the end it didn't matter. You were willing and capable, and that was all that counted."

She backed away from him, feeling sick. What was my life like, that I actually thought he would provide me with something better? If I thought he was a means to escape something worse, do I even want my old memories back anymore?

"Some objected to taking you in, given how little we knew about you," Hirsch said, continuing to smile, "but I felt that your determination to become a new person would be an asset in our efforts to recreate you. It's not easy to break a person, but when they want to be broken, the process is so much more effective. And I was proven right. This wasn't our first foray into behavior modification, but you were the first product of this particular program. And you were our best, too. We created a brand-new person with a brand-new personality, one suited to our needs. One that followed orders. You performed spectacularly - at least until you apparently started to get your old memories back. Sadly, I don't think we can perform the treatments again. No, the only option remaining to us is to eliminate the broken asset and learn from its failures."

His eyes flicked to the door, and she raised her pistol again as she instinctively moved to a position where she could cover both him and the door at the same time. Through the small window she saw the other operative she'd let live earlier. Perhaps that had been a mistake? If so, she'd find out soon enough.

The operative started shooting out the lock to get to them. Despite knowing that she had little time, she brought her hand back and pistol-whipped Hirsch across his temple. She wouldn't kill him, but that didn't mean he deserved to be left unscathed. Even if she had volunteered for the program, that didn't absolve him of responsibility for creating and running it. It didn't absolve him of responsibility for the torture he'd put her through. Her and how many others?

She made it out of the room a scant few seconds before the other operative got through the first door. He was good, very good, and managed to chase her through the training center until they were both on the roof. She stood at the edge, inches away from a dive into the East River and freedom, but he was behind her with a pistol aimed at her back.

"Why did you let me live?" he asked abruptly, shifting his grip on his gun slightly. "Why didn't you take the shot when you had the chance?"

She turned and gave him a half smile, having a good idea of the confusion he was going through. She had been like him, once. It seemed like a lifetime ago. "Do you even know why you're supposed to kill me?" she asked. He frowned, clearly not understanding yet how that answered his question. "Look at us. Look at what they make you give." Slowly, he lowered his pistol. A glimmer of comprehension crossed his face as she turned back to the edge of the roof.

She didn't hear Noah Vosen's approach, but she heard the gunshot as she jumped. She definitely felt the impact of the bullet in her back as she tumbled into the river.

Location: Unknown.

"That was Pamela Landy, testifying before the Senate today about the Treadstone and Blackbriar projects at the CIA which resulted in multiple assassinations around the world over the past several years and the arrest of nearly a dozen senior CIA officials over the last two days. According to some of the documents found in the possession of CIA Director Ezra Kramer, these projects and their activities were approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government. More arrests are expected in the coming week.

"One of the most important figures in this story, Janet Bourne, was reportedly shot as she jumped into the East River a week ago. According to our sources, this was after a running battle through the CIA facility where she was trained several years ago. So far, after two weeks of searching, her body has not been recovered. Experts say that it's virtually impossible for anyone to have survived that fall, even if they hadn't been shot."

Nicky Parsons watched the news broadcast and smiled, knowing that if they didn't find a body, then Janet was still alive. After a few moments, her smile turned wistful as her mind wandered, taking her back to happier times of living in Paris and being in love. She wondered if she'd ever feel that way again.

CIA Deep Cover Anti-Terrorism Bureau, 104 West 40th Street, New York City.

"Pamela Landy speaking."

"I understand you're the one in charge of the search for Janet Bourne."

"Yes, I... wait, who are you? How did you get this number?" Landy signaled Tom to start a trace on the call. Few people had her cell number, and none were women with a British accent.

"I saw you on TV, testifying a couple of weeks ago. Did you really know her?"

"I don't think anyone truly knew her," Landy said slowly as Tom spoke to the people who monitored communications in and out of the building. "I did meet her, though. And we talked a few times." There was a long pause, then she continued, "Why are you asking about Janet Bourne? What is your interest in her?"

"What do you know about Violet?" the mystery woman asked.

"How do you know that name?" Landy asked tightly, unable to completely hide her reaction. Janet's real name hadn't been released to the media, and as far as she knew only a handful of people on the planet were aware of it.

"So, you do know her. You weren't lying."

"If you know that name, we need to talk." Landy insisted, looking at Tom expectantly. He shook his head, telling her that the trace wasn't complete.

"Did she trust you?"

Landy hesitated. That was a tricky question which didn't have an easy answer. Finally, she said, "Yes, I think so."

"Then I'll trust you, too. I'll call back tomorrow with a place we can meet."

"Wait, why are you so interested in her?" Landy asked, desperate for any scrap of information. "If this were an official inquiry, you'd have reached out to me through channels. So this is something personal, isn't it? You knew her. But how?"

"Violet and I grew up together," the woman said. "She disappeared shortly after we graduated school, and I've been looking for her for a long, long time. She's... she's a good person. I don't know what's happened to her, but she's a good person. She's not a murderer."

Landy's skin tingled at the prospect of being so close to what she'd been anxious to learn. "She's not easy to track down - not when she doesn't want to be found. But maybe we'll do better together."

"I'd like that," came the reply, then the call ended.

"Did you get anything?" she asked. "Tell me you got something. You should have had plenty of time."

Tom frowned in annoyance as he set his handset down. "There was some sort of interference that slowed us down. We think the call came from New York City, but that was all we could get."

"Keep this quiet. I don't want anyone else to know we have a lead on the Bourne investigation." She looked down at the thin file, tapping it with her finger as a smile slowly spread across her face. "I've got a good feeling about this."