Desiring Other Times
Chapter 21 – Tanked
Disclaimer: This text is a sneak peak of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'.
JUST KIDDING! I don't own this.
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"You're serious about this?"
"Perfectly serious, Mr Potter."
"Why are you doing this?"
Dumbledore's eyes stopped twinkling and he became very serious. "Because I believe you were not supposed to have lost your magic. Because I believe you are worth it. Because… I am sure that without your help, your skills, we will be severely disadvantaged in the war that will inevitably come."
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"Give me a break, will'ya?" Jeremy groaned to himself as he finished scrawling the closing sentences on a report, then turned to regard a rather sizeable heap of assignments still awaiting their completion.
Hermione looked over at him with a steely glint in her eye, but seeing his rather tired and wan appearance, she decided to forgo the lecture that had been building up in her mind. "Are you alright, Jeremy?" The words felt meaningless, but somehow, saying such a pointless phrase had become habit.
He looked at her. "No," replied Jeremy, releasing a frustrated breath, scowling as he began scribbling on the paper he had pulled towards him, something, anything.
An indecisive look settled on Hermione's face, and she wavered between offering her assistance and letting him work on the assignments himself. Finally, she decided that it wasn't as if Jeremy was being lazy, he was just… stressed.
Jeremy stopped writing rather abruptly. He blinked at his report, and Hermione could see his eyes scanning from the top to the bottom of the piece of paper, even though there wasn't anything there.
"Jeremy?"
A rather incredulous smile appeared on Jeremy's face. "It's not cheating, is it, if I can see what my essay is going to be like in the future?"
Hermione looked at Jeremy as if he was insane. There were all sorts of things that would prevent that happening, like paradoxes and stuff… right? As her mind chugged through all the possibilities, she absently noted that her mouth was running off everything she was thinking. "That's not possible, Jeremy… but… it's a paradox – you wouldn't be able to See that essay unless you were going to write it, but if you can See it, then you won't be 'writing' it, you'll just be copying it… but that… that's impossible!"
Jeremy shrugged. "Well, if it works, it works…" Carefully, he began tracing words that only he could see, and Hermione watched on as he wrote a report that, while it was of a standard that one could accept as having been written by Jeremy, certainly wasn't something he would be turning out in the state he was in.
'I wonder… if Jeremy has the Sight, and he's Harry's twin… would Harry have had?'
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Closing my eyes – the better to concentrate – I gathered a thread of Charm and Transfiguration magic, entwined them together and extended it out from my right side. The magic swirled and fought momentarily against my control, but soon it acquiesced and formed into an ethereal arm.
To my mind, if I didn't look at it, it was as if I really had an arm back. It reminded me of the phantom pain I had experienced all those years ago, except this time all I could feel was the slight movement of air over the 'arm', and feel the 'muscles' moving against each other as I shifted the arm about. Clenching the hand into a fist, I swung it sideways and it impacted against the solid stone wall to my side.
A huge torrent of grit and dust exploded from the wall, but the majority of the rubble had been flung away from me. The thunderous sound of my sudden demolition of the wall still echoed around the maze-like dungeon I had awoken to. A now healed wound at my neck still itched at times, but that was the least of my problems at the moment.
"You are an interesting boy, Mr Potter," hissed a sibilant voice from behind – it's always from behind, isn't it?
Slowly, deliberately, I turned about and matched eyes with a very corporeal Voldemort. He opened his mouth again, and I watched his glittering eyes glance over the scratch at my neck. Before, it had been a gaping wound that had been leaking copious amounts of blood, but somehow I had managed to wake up, somehow managed to heal myself.
"Yes… quite interesting. I suppose I must thank you for having supplied some rather… important ingredients required for my return. Malfoy certainly did his job well."
Several? Unbidden, various possible theories a human body could be used to remake the body of someone else flashed through my mind, but all I could think of was blood, just blood…
"Knowledge of your Animagus form, for example, and having you drink my blood."
What?
"Ensuring that he could retrieve several of your hairs when you were in vampire form." Voldemort continued to speak, seemingly delighted in causing confusion on my part, even though I struggled to prevent it from showing on my face.
"And in the end, he brought back your arm. Ah yes, certainly more reliable than his father."
What? Draco? How could he retrieve my arm? It was blasted apart, wasn't it? And…
"Why don't you come out, Draco? You've been complaining that everyone perceives you to be less intelligent than you really are…"
Footsteps, and I whirled around, mind completely befuddled by all of this. Draco stood there, whole, complete, alive. Rather than his customary "I'm-A-Bastard" smirk, his face was set in a rather bland expression, with the slightest hint of a smile.
"Hello, Harry."
I frowned. If I were to believe Voldemort, then it meant Draco had never died and that the entire Basilisk spectacle incident had been set up just so… I would lose my arm. But I had taken the information from Flitwick's mind!
"The Flitwick you retrieved the information from… was actually not Flitwick." Draco supplied rather casually, as if he could read my mind. "He was one of our plants, and this entire charade has been orchestrated by…" With a little of the panache I had grown to expect of him, he swept a hand from temple to thigh and bowed a little. "…me, me and… who else? Oh, me."
"Certainly more reliable than his father…" Voldemort hissed right at my ear, and I fairly jumped out of my skin as he brought a hand to my shoulder. "While you may feel used right now, Mr Potter, how about thinking about it as us choosing you to help us bring this world out of the mire it has fallen into?"
I narrowed my eyes, and a sharp burst of Transfiguration magic expanded the air between his hand and my shoulder, flinging his arm back. Another burst simultaneously pushed Voldemort away from me.
Voldemort seemed to shrug it off as if it was nothing, which, I suppose, it was in the end. "You've thought it before – why are they showing my brother more respect when I am more powerful, when I am so much better than him?" His face sank into a deep scowl, and his next words were fury-etched. "It was mere chance that caused that night's events to happen – if the incantation had only been a mere second later, the fluctuation in time and space would not have been there at that moment to cause my spell to go awry. Your brother is nothing special, Mr Potter, but you, you are certainly interesting."
"We can bring about a great future, Harry. My Lord has decided that what really needs to be done is to make a new world. We will take all those that are worthy, and erase this one." Draco bowed slightly at 'My Lord', but his modulation and tone was even and measured, like the perfect subordinate.
I raised an eyebrow. "Sounds like Noah's Ark."
"That is the idea, after all."
"From a Muggle book?"
"The idea is sound. This world will be cleansed, and we will create a world where we will only rise ever higher. If need be, we will even save some of the Muggles that prove to be useful. It is not hard to respect their ability for innovation." Those words seemed very discordant with the image of Draco Malfoy that had been built up in my mind, but here he was, the words slipping from his mouth like syrup from a cut maple in harvest season.
For some reason, Voldemort's rather lengthy silence caused me to glance over at where he was, and I blinked when I realised he was no longer there.
I turned back to face Draco, but he was also no longer there. I was alone now in the suddenly eerie dungeon.
"Time to smash some more walls in," I muttered under my breath. The steady sound of my fist impacting into the walls and the rubble falling to the ground did little to alleviate the tension in my body.
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The sunlight almost blinded me as I stepped out from the dungeon, but that was not the only thing that disorientated me. I was at Stone Henge. Stone Henge. Only five hours ago, I had been in Eton. How in the nine hells of Dante did I end up at Stone Henge?! Not to mention I was quite certain that the chamber I had woken up in had been even further away from Eton…
The pillars of stone rose graciously around my world, as I hastily cast about for something that would look familiar, anything…
Completely bewildered, I whirled about several times and only stopped when something very unsettling appeared before my eyes that certainly hadn't been there the last time I had looked there.
Vampire Harry sat at the centre of the ring of stone, twirling a very familiar looking wand and seemingly impervious to the sun that flooded the area.
"How are you here?" I asked, befuddled and so tired of all of this.
"I'm here because you're here."
"No, I mean… how can you be outside of my head?"
"Because this is Stone Henge. Because there is so much magic here that even in the state you're in, I can materialize out here. Along with anything I thought to hide away inside that head of yours."
"I thought my wand was destroyed… they brought me the-"
"They brought you pieces of wood and feather that could have belonged to any holly tree and any long dead bird. Draco Malfoy's real trick was in making you draw the magic out of everything near you and causing a warp that would take him and your arm out of Hogwarts. Anything they picked up at the scene had no magic in it at all."
"So why would they bring me a fake?"
"The professors wouldn't know it to be a fake. Draco left it behind, thinking your wand would be completely vaporised. That boy…" Vampire Harry shook his head, perhaps in awe, perhaps something else that I really couldn't be bothered thinking of right now.
"For now… let's just get you home." Vampire Harry was suddenly no longer sitting seven feet away, he was now standing a foot and a half away. Smoothly, he slid my wand down the front of my pyjamas, then stepped into me. Grey mist wrapped about me, and then we were gone.
When I woke up again, I was back at Eton. The time? Merely seven hours after I had laid to rest in my bed. It was morning outside, but no-one would have thought me to be missing…
Had Draco actually been smart enough to know my Vampire form would show up at Stone Henge and take me back to Eton? The sheer contrast between the Draco I had known while attending Hogwarts and this new (and alive) Draco that had appeared had my common sense at odds with itself.
But then I remembered what had happened on the train just earlier this year. Crabbe had turned out to be far more intelligent than he had let on. And Slytherin was the house for cunning, for a brand of intelligence that was far different from the bookish smarts of Ravenclaw.
Absent-mindedly, I ran a finger over all that remained of the wound at my neck. Now, it was merely a thin line that practically faded away as I brushed over it.
Sighing softly, I tottered over to my desk and pulled out a sheet of paper from the ream that sat in the printer.
Something has happened, I need to speak with you now.
I tore off the strip of paper from the head of the sheet, and put it in Mittere's mouth. "For Dumbledore," I murmured to my owl, and he flew out the window.
For lack of anything to do, I turned my computer on and waited for it to finish loading. After logging in, I brought up my email program as was my habit, and waited for it to finish retrieving my email.
To: Potter, Harry James (hjpotter domain hidden )
From: You Know Who (no email address provided)
CC/BCC: None
Subject: None
Received: xx:xx, xx/xx/xxxx
I'm not that You Know Who, I am the other 'you know who'.
Join us.
I can bring your arm back.
And we can bring this world to a revolution that it has never seen before.
D
The rather short email had me looking at it as if Draco was insane. Here he was being the rather cliché evil, trying to bring me over. Where had all the brilliance from before gone? Or was he expecting me to think him to be less intelligent than he had shown himself, and attempt to double-cross him?
I massaged my temples as they began to pound with all the double-thinking I was doing. Waking up to a severe wound, then breaking out and finding I had been used to bring back Voldemort and that Draco had pulled the strings of an incredible scheme… and then ending up at Stone Henge and being forcefully Shadow Warped back to Eton.
Tired beyond all belief, I struggled from my pyjamas and into my uniform… With a clatter, my wand fell to the ground, and after a moment's hesitation, I picked it up and slid it into a pocket in my uniform.
Who knows, maybe an unnatural Squib like me could draw on the magic it channelled…
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Dumbledore let loose a despairing sigh. He was the only one of the Hogwarts staff at Washington Academy – there was no McGonagall to confide in or Snape to banter with or Hagrid to provide support.
Harry's very short message had smelt of Blood Magic and of vampires. The only way something like this could have happened was if someone had abducted him and involved him in a blood ritual of some sort. And the only person that would do something like that and still return him… would be Voldemort.
"Albus?" Headmistress Eckhard jolted Dumbledore out of his stupor. "What's going on, Albus?"
"He's back, Belinda. We are-"
"-completely screwed." A new voice issued in the room, and the two whirled around to face…
Draco Malfoy.
"You're… you're that-"
"Draco Malfoy at your service, madam." Draco turned to Dumbledore and with a steely glint in his eyes, nodded at somebody behind Dumbledore.
Goyle wrapped his strong arms around Dumbledore, and then thick cords wrapped about the Headmaster. Similarly, Crabbe did the same to Eckhard. "You won't be going anywhere anytime soon, Headmaster and Headmistress." Draco smirked softly. "We'll be having you sleep, now…" As Draco spoke, Crabbe and Goyle pulled out a pouch of powder and opened it, causing the fine dust to cascade over Dumbledore's and Eckhard's face.
Falling into a deep stupor, Dumbledore noted that Goyle seemed to have pulled some of his hair out, as had Crabbe with Eckhard.
What was going on?
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Author's Notes:
Hopefully this is an interesting character, and no I am not bending to the will of my readers when I wrote that Draco scene.
Yes, Voldemort is back far, far earlier than expected. The Triwizard tournament will now be held amongst all the fear and paranoia of 'The Order of the Phoenix' year, although it won't be as widespread as in 'Half Blood Prince' (for obvious reasons).
Slytherins deserve more credit. That is my belief, but I won't be pumping up all of Slytherin. Just Crabbe, Goyle and Draco.
Oh and the title for chapter 19, "Parcae", actually means something. For the love of god, I did not make that word up.