the Harry Potter experiment
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Started: 1-16-09
Finished: ????
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Disclaimers: I do not own HP or anything else other than the story's concept and direction.
Summary: When all things end, they begin once again. In another universe where the curse that had just took his parents hit Harry, it opened the floodgates to a past of who he might have had always been, and shall always be.
A/N: For the sake of my story, I changed the timelines for certain events in my story and this chapter has one of them. I made Harry a few years younger when he had that incident at the zoo.
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The "energy" that had lain dormant within young Harry Potter woke for the first time the moment the child's latent magical energy tried to whisk him to another location. As it was unable to do so, the being that had once been Methos gave the child's magical energy a boost in big way and teleported the young man almost 80 degrees straight up onto the roof of his school.
It had been a while since that fateful night where they both merged. The "old man" figured to lay low behind the child's innermost psyche until Harry would be able to assimilate the explanation Methos would give and "freak out" as it were. That's not to say that Methos did not waste what free time doing nothing. In those times when the child was asleep, the former Immortal let his mind wander and touched the world he had now tied himself to. There were absolutely no Immortals of his kind in this reality. At least, not if you count the child he had saved. By merging with him, he had turned Harry into something equivalent to a pre-immortal, and a strange one at that. Harry would be the first and only pre this world will ever know because he was not "born" as one, but sired as one instead. He didn't need to die either to activate it, once the young man reached a certain point in his prime, he would simply stop aging. Dying from an accidental death if he wasn't careful, however, will simply force his immortality to activate early. Bad news though, Methos found something else that laid dormant within the child until it awakened on that day, it was an energy that was almost familiar and close to his own.
After careful study, he realized that it was almost the same feeling of energy as the one within the lunatic that had tried to kill the boy. Harry would also be able to develop similar abilities that his would-be murderer had once he started growing up, and that would be all if the wound wasn't as grave as it was for him to interfere. Now though, you could add the abilities the former Immortal had, that Harry no doubt also inherited due to their merging. All in all, the young man would become a force to be reckoned with when he got older.
Curious about the world he now found himself in and how this was possible; he extended his senses to try to encompass the whole planet and found that a small percentage of humans had that same unidentified energy within them. To his surprise, he also sensed a whole slew of non-humans that gave off their own energy signatures. He shook his metaphorical head, this world held many secrets, it just so happened that he and the young man he merged with had more than enough time later on to explore them. As it was, the merging was not yet complete, he had to wait until Harry matured some more and then they would become one person – at least in theory, he'd never done something like this before as far as he could remember. A part of him looked forward to it, for change was always welcome, the other part was a little afraid.
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The years passed slowly for Harry, but he never forgot that day. Ever since that time, he noticed something odd every now and then that he couldn't explain. There were times Dudley and his gang caught him and pounded the living daylights out of him. A few of those beatings were even enough to warrant broken bones, but they would almost heal the next day and the scars would vanish along with it. He never got sick either, as thin and as pale as he was, he should have at gotten sick at least once. None of that happened. The only evidence of any of the beatings that he had suffered were signs of phantom pains on most of the grievously affected area.
One thing odd about the beatings however, was the fact that his body seemed to try to roll with the punches and kicks done on his person. It was as if some part of him was trying to redistribute the pain in ways to make it bearable. Though his twisting and turning in his struggles could be interpreted as a desperate act to get free, no one noticed that the blows that rained on him ever got close to his vital areas, and those that did manage to graze anything of importance, were not critical enough to cause permanent damage.
Something strange happened though, one time, the Harry hunters had gotten the drop on him again. Through no fault of his own, he had slipped on a wet patch of ground behind the park on his way home and he had lost consciousness. The last thing he saw before he blacked out were the approaching feet of the boys who had chased him, but when he woke up later, they were gone. Furthermore, they hadn't touched him. Not one bruise marred him, not even a phantom pain.
They had simply left him alone.
Harry sat on the ground, dumbfounded at the impossible realization that he hadn't been hurt. It took him a few more minutes to have enough sense of mind to stand up and head home, still dazed at his strange fortune, and again did not notice the ground where he laid just a few moments before.
Small arcs of electricity played over the puddle he slid on and evaporated the water till there was nothing left.
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The ancient Immortal seethed within the confines of the child's inner psyche. He had known those brats would go too far someday, he just wasn't expecting it to be today. It was pure blind chance Harry cut through one of the places that was still slightly slick enough from yesterday's rain for him to act.
Once the boy was out cold, it was a simple matter of turning the moisture of the surrounding area into a form of condensed steam to create a partial manifestation of corporeality. He appeared in front of the bullies in all his ghostly Horseman glory and scared them shitless when he quoted a line from "Monty Python".
For children who were in varying degrees of girth, especially Harry's fat lard of a cousin, He was immensely amused to watch them nearly break the sound barrier in their attempts to run away from him as fast as they could. Uneducated children these days, he harrumphed, no love for the classics.
He peered down at his host and smiled. Harry was such a pure soul in contrast to who Methos was, even more so than the idiot Highlander had been. One could only hope that the child would never lose that sense of innocence when he grew older, what with the nasty things life usually threw their way. Because heaven help them should Harry also inherit the Horseman's personality once they finally merge as one being, he knew no one would survive the outcome should they piss him off long enough. In fact, the Dursleys would probably be the first ones to go, no question about it. He may have been a murderous bastard of biblical proportions in the past, but he still had a sense of right and wrong, even if a huge part of that was missing during that phase of his life. He was a killer who simply killed; never in his time as a Horseman had he abused a child the way Harry's relatives did. Kronos would probably have done it for the entertainment value, but never Methos.
He checked to make sure none of the buffoons lingered before he drew himself back into Harry's mind with great reluctance. It felt good being out for once, too bad the child was still too young to drink or he would have made an outing and emptied a local pub of all of its alcoholic wares.
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Time passed once more for Harry as the day-to-day routine of being hurt, fixed, and sometimes, receiving unknown help from a stressed-out Methos who kept a very tight reign on himself from fully manifesting a corporeal form just to rip the Dursleys into so many pieces that even a jigsaw puzzle addict would be too frustrated to put back together.
It was an exercise in patience on them both.
As it was, between the never-ending hassles Harry's relatives presented, the consciousness that was still Methos spent most of his free time outside of keeping an eye on him to study and incorporate the unknown energy the boy had within to his essence so the merging won't be as painful as it would be had Harry been a normal human.
The routine was broken one day when they dragged Harry to spend the day with his cousin at the zoo for Dudley's birthday outing. Mrs. Figg wasn't able to baby-sit Harry that day so the Dursleys were forced to bring him along. Everything had been going along normally until they went into the reptile section.
Dudley saw one of the bigger snakes on the floor to ceiling display that was near the glass and began to rap on the window. Right below said window was the sign: "Do Not Knock On The Glass".
"Come on!" Dudley yelled through the glass. "Do something!"
After the child exhausted himself from pounding on the tempered glass, Dudley leaned against the glass and wheezed. "This is boring." He said.
To Harry, the snake looked miserable, he unconsciously commiserated with the reptile out loud and got a direct reply via Spanish-accented snake hiss in shock. Unfortunately, Dudley noticed that the snake's attention was on Harry as it bobbed its head in a conversational-like manner.
"Hey, it's doing something!" Dudley cried out in delight and renewed his pounding on the glass while he rudely shoved Harry out of the way to get the snake's attention to focus on him.
Methos couldn't do a thing as the strange energy he had noticed inside the boy flared in automatic response at the "attack" and both host and spirit stared as the glass that divided man from beast vanished. It was a minor miracle that the fat fool didn't do a swan dive into the now open reptile habitat. The boy threw his arms about and flailed like a beached whale, and it wasn't doing any wonders for him either. The boy's parents frantically tried to haul their son away from the exposed habitat.
The large snake sniffed the air with its tongue and eased itself out of its former enclosure. It ambled close to Harry, hissed its thanks and slithered to freedom, heedless of the chaos it left in its wake when everyone scrambled to get away from its path.
Methos and his host just stared in stupefaction, both at a loss for mental and literal words. After the incident, the two had, of one mind, come to one single question: What the bloody hell is going on here? Methos was more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the child's inner energy. The more he thought about it, it reminded him of the same feeling he sensed from an old man he knew a long time ago: Ambrosius Embreis. Though the old coot told him then that he used a different name at the time when they met when he took Methos to be his last apprentice.
The former immortal snapped out of his reminisce in surprise. Once that information clicked, everything fell into place. The lost god felt like slapping himself several times in the face for not looking at the obvious. The child's inner energy was MAGIC. Albeit it was a different resonance of the energy from his reality, he should have known it for what it was. The child he had merged with will grow up to be a mage in the future.
The question now was; what type of magic do his kind practice? Was it the same as Ambrosius's? More importantly, just how powerful will they become now that a deified immortal had unwittingly merged with the boy's own spirit once the child's time as a human ends? For human is still what Harry is in blood until he fully matures naturally or the change to immortality is forced by an accidental death. Lost god though he was, Methos was not omnipotent, but he knew that once a pre-immortal stops being mortal, their blood undergoes a drastic, but subtle metamorphosis. They can be universal donors for humans, yes, but after their blood leaves their body and latches itself to another via transfusion, the blood taken takes the healthier characteristics of the transfused once it had finished healing them. That is to say, like a fingerprint, once it becomes part of a normal human's system, it no longer shares the resemblance of the original immortal host. That was one reason why a complete transfusion does not make a normal human take on immortal characteristics, or even become immortal for that matter. The immortal's quickening was more spiritual in nature than biochemical, you had to be "born" one to become one, or in this case, sired by a completely whole Methos himself as the Source.
The lost god also knew that the time for his self-enforced silence was almost over. Now that he realized that the strange unknown energy was actually the boy's magical core, he knew that the time had come to make himself known to Harry. The boy had to be trained, fast, if only to make sure that he wouldn't become a danger to himself and to others. If the mage was powerful enough to do magic just on survival instincts alone even at young age then the mage must be trained to harness it as early as possible or the something dire would happen if he was left unchecked and his or her baser emotions took hold of them in the long run.
"This is going to be fun." He thought sarcastically. It had been a very long time since he had practiced Magic, and even with his knowledge, he had never taken an apprentice. The magic that had graced his world had retreated into mists once Ambrosius died, and so he never bothered looking for one.
Tonight, Methos decided. Once the child was asleep, he would enter his dream and begin the training inside their combined mindscape.
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It had been a very taxing day for Harry; the Dursleys had managed to escape the notice of the bedlam that was the Reptile Exhibit in the zoo and drove them home as fast as their car could take them. Once home, he endured the longer than normal punishments and was rudely shoved into his cupboard without as much as a single bite of dinner.
Harry couldn't care less, however. He did not feel hungry at all as his mind tried to process what had happened. As far as he knew, snakes shouldn't talk. There was also the fact that throughout the punishments he received today did not even sting one bit. Sure, he felt them land, but the blows felt as if they were simply light taps rather than the usual amount of pain he normally took in.
Maybe he really was a freak.
Harry didn't realize that Methos was having a hell of a time trying to work with the kid's own recently-emerged powers that seemed to stay "on" permanently ever since that incident when he teleported. Before all this, when the child was younger, it was only the quickening that took care of all of Harry's physical abuse. Somehow, it all changed once Harry's magical core "woke" up and was able to wrap itself around the young teen's body and covered it with an invisible net of mystic steel. The pain he suffered at these occasions always seem as if it came muted when they landed, the "net" literally covered every inch of Harry's frame from any serious life-threatening assaults. Those that did manage to get through that first line of defense ran into the young man's quickening that dealt it a final blow.
Harry was never fully aware of all this though. He simply just chalked them up as a strange set of coincidences whenever they happened, but now though, he was starting to wonder why him. Confused, the young man settled in to sleep as comfortably as he could inside his cupboard room.
It wasn't long before Harry fell asleep and started to dream.
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He was back in the strangely familiar house. The whole place was lit in a muted green haze. He felt as if his movements were leaden as each step throughout the odd house felt like he was wading through water. The temperature dropped considerably as he closed in on the one room his dream always had a fixation on. He reached out a small hand to open the door.
Unlike the previous times where a flash of bright green light and the scream that usually woke him up in the wee hours of the morning occurred, but none of those things happened as the door in his dream opened. He stared as he was finally able to look inside the room for the first time since the dreams began when he was old enough to remember.
Within what looked like an old-fashion nursery stood a man who looked to bear a passing resemblance to him but with long hair and sported an electric blue paint that adorned one side of his face. His clothes were also strange as it was an off-color white, a sword of some sort hung down his left side as he stared back at Harry. The boy searched the man's face and noticed that he also had electric-blue eyes that matched the paint on the other half of his face somewhat. A small smile graced his lips when he finally spoke.
"Hello Harry." The man said, making a show of looking around the room. "I believe its time we talked, and about this little dream you have while we're at it too."
"Who are you, sir?" Harry asked as politely as he could, strangely at ease in front of someone who looked even more intimidating than his relatives could ever be.
"I'll give you a very long and detailed answer sometime in the future when you're ready." The man answered. "But the short answer is that, in essence, I'm you. My name is Methos."
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TBC?
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AN 2: Yes, Methos is quite possibly THE most powerful being in the HP world right now, bad thing about it is, the old man himself does not know this and neither will he remember everything even after he and the Source merged back together, especially since they now live within Harry. Both of them, once merged, will still not know their full potential. That's not to say that all of Methos's memories will up and disappear once they become one person -- that part of it was already gone when I made him split himself to create the race known as "Immortals" in his universe when I made the first chapter. This is kind of a Super Harry fic -- but with a Methos mentality, so he will be slightly Gray-ish to dark as a reflection of how one should not mess with a former Horseman when they really get pissed enough to want to blow the world to smithereens. As I write this, I have a vague idea where this fic is going, and I hope to butcher the original HP timeline with the life experiences and skills/abilities of a man who had become a "lost god". I hope you like it and maybe want more....