Disclaimer: Harry Potter and his whole universe belongs to J. K. Rowling and her associates. I'm just having a good time playing with it all, and I - unlike the owner - don't make a penny from it.

A/N: Ch. 1 of my do-over, should I get the urge to write it. I have a gazillion ideas for this, but very few ideas on how to bend them into a readable format. Only time will tell if I ever find out how.

Here We Go Again

Ch. 1

How it began

There he sat, a glass of horribly expensive whisky in hand, pondering fate, life, future and other things of consequence. Okay, most would probably say he was brooding in true Harry Potter fashion, but he wasn't most so he could call it whatever he wanted. He was 26 years old, and thanks to a couple of inheritances he was well to-do. Well, he was actually fairly wealthy. He was single - regardless of Molly and Ginny Weasley's wishes to the contrary. Despite never actually completing the initial training - or even qualifying for it for that matter - he was an Auror Squad Leader, and bloody good at it too. Only... He hated it with a fiery passion! What the effing Hell possessed him to allow Shacklebolt to get him drunk enough to sign that bloody 20-year contract 8 years ago? What had happened to his life?

He had ended the Resurrection War at 18, and then it was like his life had ground to a halt. He'd served his purpose, although the Weasley women had tried to impress on him for eight years now that his life's new purpose was to marry Ginny and produce a gaggle of children. Not bloody likely!

He'd even known for seven years now that he'd never rise above his current level in the Auror Corps, or in any other Department for that matter. Minister Shacklebolt had informed him of that personally a week after he'd caused an uproar at the ridiculous 'First Annual Victory Day Ball', when - after being ordered to attend when he told the Minister that he didn't intend to go near it - he'd shown up in jeans and t-shirt and a Silversmith twin on each arm and adamantly refused to even touch the Order of Merlin (1st class), and made both Shacklebolt (who'd just called him 'my good, personal friend' in his long winded speech. Feh! If he was his friend, he would've known he didn't want their scrap metal) and the committee behind the idiocy look half as smart as bricks. If they really wanted to honour him, why couldn't they just do it by respecting his wishes and letting him live in peace? That would make him happy; it didn't take effort, and it was free too, unlike the bloody statue - that didn't even look like him - they'd erected 'in his honour' in the Alley. He'd blasted the hideous thing to rubble less than ten seconds after it'd been revealed, and he'd felt unspeakably good about it. The Fiscal Department still tried to make him pay for that pathetic piece of marble now, more than six years later. George Weasley had laughed his arse off, for the first time since Fred's death almost two years prior as far as he knew, but very few others had shown any understanding for Harry's feelings about the whole circus. In fact people had made such a good effort to drown him in Howlers, berating him for being immature and ungrateful, that he'd taken to such drastic measures as to erect a ward that fried post owls on contact unless they were keyed in, which only those from the Minister, the Director of Magical Law Enforcement, and Hermione's personal owl were.

Hermione... She'd been the only thing stopping him from just leaving everything behind in those crazy days, and in a way she still was, only now for a different reason. Back then she'd volunteered a lot of her time to just be there for him, lending an ear when he ranted about the sheep of the world. Eventually she'd decided that he needed to do something constructive with his spare time, and so she began to teach him Runes and Arithmancy. Much to her - and his - surprise he took to it like a duck to water, and for the next three years they'd met at least three times a week, partly for lessons and partly just to talk and enjoy their friendship.

Then she'd gone and married Ron Weasley and everything went down the crapper. She'd quit her job at Ron's insistence, despite it being the very job she'd dreamed about since finding out that she was a witch. A little while later he'd found out about their cosy afternoons together, and then all Hell broke loose. He wouldn't listen to anything, but demanded that they stopped seeing each other, and much to Harry's surprise Hermione complied. That was three years ago, and she hadn't spoken to him since. He still saw her in the Alley from time to time, but she never acknowledged him. Not in word, nor in gesture. It was like they'd never even met each other.

He still studied her though, and the more he saw, the more it became clear that something was wrong. He'd last seen her about a year ago in the Alley, and he'd been shocked. The Hermione he'd known for fifteen years kept herself fit and healthy. She was brash, confident, ever curious and fully aware of her own worth. The one he saw that day was not that Hermione. That one was gaunt, drawn and haggard, and didn't pay any attention to anything but the infant in her arms and to her boorish husband in front of her who loudly berated and belittled her all the way from the apparition point to the Leaky Cauldron, only to get a timid 'yes Ron' in return every now and again. This was not Hermione. This was not the woman he knew and - dared he say - loved. This one was a pale caricature. An empty shell with a superficial likeness, but the real Hermione had disappeared.

He'd rushed to investigate at the Department, only to find out - much to his disgust - that he couldn't do a thing. As long as they were legally married and Hermione filed no complaints, he could do nothing. He couldn't even investigate as long as she didn't show clear signs of abuse, and no matter how clear the signs were to him, there were no visible bruises or spell-damage, so he was in effect check mated.

To make it all even better, Minister Shacklebolt in own, self righteous person had informed him that he was to leave the Weasleys alone and not look into Hermione's transformation from woman to doormat again. No matter what might be the problem, her blood status contra her husband's made her off limits. Harry blew a gasket right there and then and laid into the Minister at full force, and in full view and/or hearing of the whole Auror Department, for just unthinkingly continuing the policies that brought Voldemort about and almost saw him winning. That little episode saw him suspended without pay until he publicly apologised, and Andromeda - his godson's grandmother - pressured and outright threatened into denying him rights to visit, or to be visited by, Teddy. Harry thought that twelve years of forced inactivity was a tad excessive, but better that than the alternative. He really didn't think there was any need to apologise for telling the truth.

Instead of apologising as Shacklebolt demanded, he'd gotten snarky. In an article to The Daily Prophet under the headline 'I'm sorry', he went on to apologise for ridding them of Voldemort; for saving the undeserving sheep that they were; for leaving corrupt incompetents in charge in the Ministry, and for raining on everybody's parade by having the audacity to come out of the whole thing alive despite both the Ministry's and the general public's best attempts to make sure he wouldn't. Then he'd tightened his wards to their maximum; shut down the Floo, and set to work on completing the theory of a very interesting ritual he'd come across in a confiscated tome. One that he'd regrettably 'forgotten' to turn over to the Department after a raid.

It was a very special book indeed. It was the personal journal of the world's first - and so far also last - Grand Master of both Arithmancy, Ritual Magic and Runes, Filippos Nikolidis (1391-1534), and it contained everything the old Greek genius had ever worked on. Fortunately for Harry it was written in Latin, the universal language of Roman schooled Arithmancers. Near the very end of it Nikolidis had begun to describe a complicated ritual, but in 1530, when it was almost written out, he'd discontinued it with a remark about how unpredictable and insanely dangerous it would be to attempt it. The ritual and its purpose was never mentioned again in the four years he'd lived on from that point.

He spent almost a year completing the theory for the ritual, helped immensely by the rest of the very complex descriptions of rituals in the book, as well as Kreacher's willingness to do anything, including 'borrowing' books from several public collections, for the man who completed the task that his Master Regulus had given him so many years back. Finally a couple of days ago he'd cracked the last nut, courtesy of the journal that Kreacher had 'liberated' from the Weasley household. Harry didn't believe Hermione would mind, or even miss it for that matter. She didn't much look like she had the time or the drive to start cracking runic puzzles these days.

Now the whole setup was finished, and that was why he was pondering. Would he do it? Could he do it? If yes, was it the right thing to do? With Hermione effectively dead to the world, and Neville having the time of his life, waist deep in strange and insanely dangerous plants somewhere in the Sumatran jungle for years to come, there was nothing left for him, but what would he meet if the ritual succeeded? More importantly... What would happen if it didn't?

In the end though, there really was only one option. He used his Animagus to get past the junior Aurors stalking around Grimmauld Place (a blackbird might not be the most impressive Animagus form out there, but it was dead useful) and went to Gringott's where he updated his Will, leaving everything - except a small fund dedicated to supporting Neville's research into medicinal and healing plants - to Teddy on the condition that he left the country upon reaching his majority and used a sizeable part of the fortune to work against pureblood bigotry in all its forms. Once done with that, he went back home and told Kreacher to keep up the new standards of the House, and to keep everything in order until the new Master would eventually come into his inheritance. A gentle reminder that Teddy actually had more Black blood in his veins than Harry had made it easy for Kreacher to accept the changes that were coming his way. No reason to tell anybody that if his plans actually worked out as he hoped, this reality would most likely cease to exist.

Exactly sixteen months after he'd seen the mindless automaton that his best friend had become, Harry sat in the centre of the heptagon he'd painstakingly made from Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Saxon Runes. He'd double and triple checked everything, and now the rest was up to Fate - and the genius that was Filippos Nikolidis. He gave a brief thought to the possible outcomes of what he was attempting. If it worked as Nikolidis said it would - and if he'd completed the missing bit of the theory correctly - he'd erase this timeline and end up some time in his past. When he'd come back to was a little hit-and-miss, but he couldn't go back any further than the date of his birth. If Nikolidis was wrong, there were two options: Either he would still go back to some time in his past, but this timeline would continue as it was, only without him in it, and he'd be in a 'mirror universe' for lack of a better term; or he would simply commit an elaborate suicide and nothing else would happen. With a last look around what he still thought of as his godfather's room, he decided to gamble on the old Greek. He cast a quick 'Incendio' on the journal and his notes, and then he held the Elder Wand to the control Rune and pushed all his magic into the spell that would energize it and start the reaction. His last conscious thought was of Hermione and how he would do everything to save her from the fate she'd met, and then his world dissolved into wave after wave of utter agony.

A couple of days later an apathetic Hermione Weasley finished attending to her young daughter, and then sat down at the kitchen table to have whatever her husband had left her for breakfast. The discarded newspaper on the table stirred the starved reader in her enough for her to pick it up, and she unfolded it and settled down to enjoy a stolen moment.

Scant seconds later the main headline started a process that would cause a stir in the magical society of Britain. The headline that finally managed to break her out of her compulsion-induced haze was the one that announced that the Boy-Who-Lived had been found dead in his home after the wards had come down, thus allowing the Aurors surveying his neighbourhood to enter the house. It was ruled a suicide, given that he was found sitting upright in the middle of a ritual heptagon that gave off residue of an immensely powerful spell of an unknown nature. According to sources in Gringott's, Mr. Potter's fortune was entailed for his godson, Teddy Lupin, except for a minor fund to support specific research into healing plants. The Goblins also let slip that there was a clause in it to deter less savoury types from trying to get to the inheritance through Teddy: Should he not reach his majority, the whole thing would be used to set up a retirement home for overworked House-elves, and both Families would be considered extinct.

Hermione spent the next hour crying over how wrong everything had turned out, and for how the bigoted laws of the society, she'd given her youth to, had allowed Ronald Weasley to basically tear away her mind and free will, forcing his bidding on her in every aspect. Hell, she couldn't see their scam of a marriage as anything but her being his convenient plaything and legal rape-victim. He'd used low intensity compulsions on her since the year after Voldemort's downfall, and after a few years of that she'd been so far gone that he'd even been able to forbid her from working and from seeing Harry, and the next thing she knew she was pregnant, unemployed, completely subservient and without a wand. She still was - except now the subservience was gone.

Knowing what she now did about the purebloods' stranglehold on Wizarding Britain - a society that a halfblood and a muggleborn had gone through Hell to save for them - she knew she had no way to legally leave her marriage, and without money or wand she'd be chased down in a matter of minutes if she just ran off, so she had to do something else.

Finally it came to her, and she spent the next hour or so planning for her escape from the hell she'd been in for years. After she'd fed her 'husband' - and used every scrap of willpower she possessed to conceal her revulsion - she excused herself to go and brew a couple of potions that she'd need 'for the new baby'. She might not have a wand, and she might be under Ron's scrutiny, but she'd earned an Outstanding on her Potions NEWT while Ronald Weasley wouldn't know vinegar from a pustule curative draught.

She was still working when Ron went to bed, and once she was certain he was asleep, the real work began. She'd been brewing three different potions this evening, and now she poured carefully measured amounts of them all into the biggest cauldron in the house until she had nearly two gallons of the mixture. Then she lit the fire under the cauldron; went and kissed her daughter and apologised for what she was about to do; and then she went and sat at the kitchen table, rereading the article as she waited.

Some time shortly after midnight while Hermione was still sitting quietly at the table, reminiscing the times when she still had her best friend, brother and rock, the volatile concoction in the cauldron reached its critical temperature.

The papers - both Wizarding and Muggle - all wrote about the mysterious explosion that had rocked the small town of Chudley to its core. Its origin had been pinpointed - quite easily - to a spot about a mile outside of town, but what had caused it was unknown. The epicentre used to be a plot of land with a shabby cottage standing on it, owned by a Mr. Ronald Weasley, but the cottage had been demolished so thoroughly that nothing could be found of it, and therefore there was nothing left to test to find out which explosive had been used, and no clues to find as to how and why it had been set off, nor to who might have had enough of an axe to grind to blow up the young family.

In the back room of his shop in Diagon Alley, George Weasley finished the article about his 'hero' brother's death in an unexplained explosion. He quietly rose from his chair and made his way to a cabinet from which he pulled a tumbler and a bottle of expensive whisky. After pouring himself a shot, he lifted the glass in a toasting motion. "Cheers, Hermione. Finally that miserable arsehole got what he had coming to him. Thank you, and I'm sorry I couldn't do anything to help you. May you be at peace wherever you've gone to."

Pain! Pure, unending, unadulterated hurt was his first impression when he came to. Nikolidis had theorised in the journal that it could possibly be painful, but that was like saying that being hit with the killing curse could possibly be slightly dangerous. This made the Cruciatus curse feel like a minor inconvenience. Then his higher functions began to kick in, and the first thing that became clear was that something had gone wrong. He had aimed for the end of second year, just before Hermione - and the other victims of the Basilisk - was cured, and this wasn't it. This wasn't near the end of second year. It wasn't Hogwarts either. It wasn't even in his Hogwarts years, as evidenced by the noise of someone stomping down the stairs that made up the 'ceiling' of his cupboard. Only then did he realise, he'd been crying out in pain, and apparently loudly enough to set Vernon off.

Frantically he tried to pinpoint the time. The deciding clue was the throbbing pain from an untreated broken arm, placing him just after his sixth birthday. This was bad! And as Vernon reached the bottom of the stairs, he realised that it was about to get even worse. Pinning everything on a fervent hope that Nikolidis had been right that he'd retained his control - if not his full level of power - he braced himself for the walrus-shaped lump of bad temper to begin the punishment for disturbing his night.

Sure enough... The cupboard door was flung open with a bang, and a meaty arm preceded a stream of profanities in the direction of his mattress. Next thing Harry found himself airborne, about to impact the wall opposite his cupboard with considerable force - and then the timeline went all out of whack. A burst of magic - and Harry would never be able to tell if it was accidental or not - cushioned him when he hit the wall, and another saw Vernon Dursley sailing through the kitchen, impacting the cooker and continuing through the thin partition wall behind it while cradling the appliance. That had definitely not happened twenty years ago!

Harry winced when the sound of Vernon and the cooker crashing into the brick wall in the sitting room reached him, and then time seemed to slow down. In a daze he got to his feet, and then he began to trace a Runeset on the staircase to set up a contained Earthquake Wave, unconsciously working to get it done before Petunia could react to the ruckus and come downstairs. He could already hear the screeching of the horse-faced Banshee draw closer, indicating that it was still fairly early in the night since she apparently hadn't been asleep, when he had an idea. He had ten years and six summers of slavery and near-starvation, as well as now two broken arms and other assorted bruises to 'thank' these twisted animals for, and given the amount of pain he'd just endured, he felt entitled to watch the show to the end.

He traced the control Rune for the Wave, and then he retreated to the darkest corner of the living room where he'd have a prime view of what would happen next. He was just in the nick of time, as Petunia almost came flying down the stairs with murder in her eyes, looking for what dared to interrupt her precious Duddikins' sleep. Harry had a hard time keeping his laughter in when she stopped like she'd hit an invisible wall, and then her jaw dropped. Her spotless home was in shambles! The kitchen was destroyed; the partition wall all but obliterated, and her husband lay under the cooker at the far wall of the living room. It all boiled down to only one possible explanation in Petunia Dursley's mind.

"FREAK! What have you done? If I get a hold of you, I swear I'll make you regret you were ever born!"

"Boo!" Harry whispered from his hiding spot. Then he placed his thumb on the remote command Rune he'd traced on the wall beside him and concentrated fiercely on triggering the control Rune on the staircase, and all Hell broke loose.

A groaning sound filled the house at it began to sway. Moments later pipes and fittings began to snap, and boards and bricks came loose while tiles began to drop from the roof. Then something unexpected happened, and Harry's hastily concocted plan was shot to Hell. He crumbled and hit the floor in agony as the wards cascaded and failed, the backlash hitting him like a ton of bricks and his magic and consciousness draining by the second. Apparently Dumbledore had tied them even closer to him than he'd believed, and now he was paying for yet another crime committed in the name of the old goat's 'Greater Good'.

Harry's hastily improvised scheme had called for watching as the Dursleys' 'perfectly normal' life went down the sewer, and then apparate to St. Mungo's Hospital, counting on the place being public enough to deter Dumbledore from just swooping in and erasing people's memories left, right and centre. Now he was down to the bare basics of survival, and his remaining magic reacted to get him away from the danger. Harry only had the word 'safety' in mind, and with that at the forefront he felt the uncomfortable sensation of being squeezed through a garden hose until he hit a carpeted floor in an unknown location. Dazed and hurting, he heard a high-pitched voice call "MUM!" as he keeled over.

'Well... Shit!' he thought, and then the world around him went black.

At the same time, in a castle in the most remote part of the Scottish Highlands, Albus Dumbledore's evening was rapidly charging up the list of the ten worst evenings in his long life. He'd been roused from his early slumber by the alarm that signified that Harry was in even greater distress than normal for the boy, and as soon as he entered his office to deal with the pesky contraption, all his other monitoring devices had gone off, one after the other, until a veritable cacophony of screeching noises threatened to take his hearing away. The total sum of what the noisy gadgets told him made his mind lock up and his blood run cold. He was faced with a complete ward failure, along with an as yet unknown magic used with hostile intent at Harry Potter's address. The ward failure was actually worse than the hostile magic right now, since he'd tied the wards very tightly to the boy's magic, and as he'd been in great distress already before they went down, the backlash could easily kill the lad. Nothing with enough power to do that should ever be able to come close enough to even try to bring them down. He'd layered them that way, but the evidence was right in front of him.

Then one of the few silent devices coughed a few times and stopped spinning, and his evening got even worse. That particular gizmo tracked Harry's physical whereabouts, and for it to stop working meant one of two things: Either the boy was dead, or the self-supporting tracking charm it connected to had been dispelled, which would require either someone more powerful than him, or Harry's magic drained to the last erg. Either possibility was bad news for the old Headmaster. No matter what was responsible for it, he no longer had any means of tracking Harry. This was a complete and unmitigated disaster! As the magnitude of the event crept into his mind, it finally dawned on him that it would be prudent to remove himself to Little Whinging to assess the damage in person.

He arrived at Privet Drive in the middle of complete chaos. The house resembled a war zone: Floors and ceilings had gaping holes in them; windows were cracked or blown out; pipes stuck out of the walls; tiles littered the garden, and in the middle of what had been a living room stood a catatonic Petunia Dursley, dumbly staring at her husband who was cuddled up with a kitchen appliance below a serious dent in the outer wall. He couldn't believe his eyes. Every plan, every hope and every scheme he had for the future had been destroyed, and no matter what happened now, no matter if the boy was dead or alive, the wards around this place couldn't be rebuilt, and all his plans for the lad's upbringing, which revolved around the less than savoury setup he'd made here, would have to be rethought and rebuilt. No, this day was second only to the day his sister died in terms of ranking on his list of catastrophes in his life, and depending on who had the boy now - provided he was still alive - it could still go no. 1.

A quick scan revealed residue of an unfamiliar - at least to him - Runic sequence on the remains of the staircase, proving to him that the wards had somehow failed and let in someone with intent to kidnap and/or harm the boy. He would have to investigate how that could have happened, but first he had to start searching for the lad. It wouldn't do for him to be in the hands of Death Eaters, nor would it do anybody any good to have him with someone who'd let him learn about who and what he was. Either possibility would mean the death of the pitiful, ragged remains of his clever schemes to bring down Tom Riddle for good.

Suddenly a screech from the horse-faced woman startled him out of his musings.

"You promised!" Petunia screamed. "You wrote in that bloody letter that if we took the brat in, you guaranteed it would keep us safe from anything. What do you call this?" He recoiled at the force and anger in her assault.

"I assure you Petunia... If you hadn't taken in young Harry, this would have killed you all. Only the protection brought about by taking him in saved you this night." He surreptitiously shot a calming charm and a compulsion for trust and truth her way. "Now please, what happened here before I came, and where is Harry?"

"I don't know where that miserable brat is. I'm just glad he's not here. I don't know what happened either. Vernon went downstairs to put the freak in his place, and the next minute it sounded like there was a war going on down here. When I came down, Vernon was like that," she pointed shakily at the peculiar sight below the dent in the wall, "...and the freak was nowhere to be seen. Then everything began shaking, and a minute later it looked like this."

Dumbledore's legilimency had been working full force while Petunia spoke, and he didn't detect any lies from her. What he did pick up was the reality of being Harry Potter around these people. It seemed they were quite a bit harsher on the lad than he'd believed they would be, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The more pliant and desperate for acceptance and friendship the boy was, the easier it would be to implement the later phases of his plan. Of course it now all depended on finding the lad and returning him here with whatever ward-scheme it would be possible to cook up.

A/N2: Who is the owner of the high-pitched voice? I'm operating with 5 ideas for that: Marietta Edgecombe, Sally-Anne Perks, Tracey Davis, Victoria Frobisher – who I have as a year older than Harry, or Demelza Robins – who I picture a year younger than Harry.