Disclaimer: Don't own. Don't care. Writing this for free.
AN: I went back to ch1 and changed the godparents; Sirius and Marlene for Charlus and both Longbottoms for Harry. It struck me that as Charlus was the first born James would have made his heir the godson of his brother in all but blood... does this change anything? Actually, it does, but not overly much, you see I changed the godparents 5 times before posting and ended up with the wrong version up. I do have plans for this thing for the few first books, so no worries about me not planning ahead.
I planned to update this on October... but inspiration came to me so *shrugs*. Now with the chapter.
This chapter is a bit of a prologue too... but I promise that on the next one you will get to see a bit of where this story is going.
WORDCOUNT 3.5K+
Published on: 8/24/2017. Unbetaed.
Chapter 2: The Start Before the Start
One's life is what most people cherish the most. Being an ordinary person before dying, the would-be OC used to be this way. She was born in a good family where drama was nearly nonexistent and the struggles of daily life was that of simple mortals. Unlike her sibling and other relatives, this girl spent way too much time reading useless stories of all kinds on the web, her crappy computer more a source of procrastination than the tool for work her parents had in mind when they bought it for her. She was the happiest when on vacation, where she could sleep until continuing to sleep was a godly level of difficult; and yet, she accomplished such feat of laziness with a flourish the kind of which comes with an iron will and a bed made of magnets.
All in all, she was pretty boring.
Her death... well, let's not go there. Point is she breathed her last breath and was on her way to the fourth level of Dante's inferno to forever run along with all the rest of the souls who lived life under worshipping the Capital Sin of Sloth... but then, her soul could not get into the first layer due the fact that, while being useless in her first life, she had a virtuous heart and the Original Sin had long since baptized out of her. So she, technically, had the qualifications to enter heaven, but an equal pull to the parcel of hell reserved for those too lax on the pursuit of all that is good and virtuous.
Thus, taking a page out of Buddha, the God Yhaveh decided to send the woman's soul to cycle of rebirth.
Be it due divine will or not, the soul of Ana fell into the endless whirlpool of multiverse repartition, and her metaphorical "GET OUT OF JAIL, FREE" card lead her to the fictional word she wasted most of the time reading about.
This start could have been a fresh start for the girls soul, one in which she could grow up from scratch with no more knowledge than a regular babe, if not for her recognizing Meng Po, the lady of forgetfulness from Chinese Folklore, who would feed a tea that would mind wipe her to a blank slate. Now, the woman could not have that, not when the thought of having to relearn everything she had ever learnt would imply too much effort.
Knowledge was power! Power allowed people to choose a life where minimal effort was an option! So she would go to the next life with an armful of knowledge, be reborn a genius and get herself a cushy job somewhere... probably supervising a poor chap doing manual labor and getting a thick fat check at the end of the day.
All in all her plan was flawless.
So, as regular people who hadn't read enough rebirth-centered fiction were dealing with the overwhelming knowledge of their deaths, the soul of a lazy girl pretended to drink the tea, and she tossed the contents of her cup into the one belonging to the soul right behind hers, unknowingly dooming the guy from behind her to be born with brain damage...
But nobody cares about that guy, so let us move on.
Fast-forward a few seconds and the female soul was now standing before one of the gates of rebirth, each one of which lead to a different world, with different rules and fates that would end up assigned according to karma points earned in life.
Unfortunately for the protagonist of this tale, her treacherous act made her loose the little good karma she had gathered in her unremarkable life -meaning, her luck on the next life was doomed to be pretty bad.
And, as someone with bad luck, she clearly got discovered trying to cheat the gatekeeper of rebirth. Seeing the angered mob of celestial officials rushing to apprehend her, she began running, her ghost-like body a better runner than her fleshy one ever was. Then, as cliché demands, she tripped onto another soul (a particularly shiny one) that was about to enter a portal that was not the one meant for her, and the two souls tumbled into the nothingness, fates intermingled to the point of sharing the same womb.
...
Have you ever read any fictional tales about reborn person remembering life as fetuses, remembering the warmth inside their mothers' womb as they float in the safe sea of body fluids, of how they remembered crying when the world around them squeezed them and sent them out to the cruel world outside making them cry from the knowledge of what they lost or lies ahead?
If you have read them and believed them you are way too naive.
Truth is, nobody remembers their time in the womb, and babes held no capability to remember anything but their mother's voice up to the third month of life. So, when Charlus Potter was born, the confusion and inability to think and make sense of the world around made the baby restless in his soul. And so, the baby cried asking for someone to soothe a restlessness that he didn't know why he was feeling.
Then the third month mark was reached and *bibbidi bobbidi boo* you got the magic moment in which the main character thinks "Oh Crap I was reborn" which came along with the kaboom of accidental magic. And so, the soul stopped being restless. The next order of business for the babe was to rest his vocal chords that had been damaged to the point of almost making a mute out of him.
Now as for the months after the third month mark... they were impossible to remember for Charlus. You see, little babies had short memories because their brains could not remember much for long. The only thought that was able to linger was that the baby was who he was, but that there was a before. A sort of maturity and pessimism, the likes of which life makes sure all adults learn given time, the baby had a perception that crying was good for nothing at all, and never helped solve any problems.
If the baby held the smarts of his past life, he would understand that babies NEEDED to cry, that for them crying did indeed solve all problems because there were people waiting to cover all their needs at the barest hint of a crocodile's tear.
To reinforce the wrong notion of crying being useless, the needs of the baby were seen too without the baby needing to do even the effort of crying. Unknowingly, the Potter parents were reinforcing the laziness of their baby by not letting it work for what he needed from a very tender age, for had they waited a day or two of not feeding or changing, the babe would have been disabused of the notion of not needing to cry, which ultimately resulted in a frighteningly quiet baby that would make them fret due the abnormalness of his behavior.
The change in temperament in the baby was wrongly pinned to the accidental magic. And the ignorant parents worried to no end.
Eventually, the lack of constant crying from baby Charlus allowed the Potters to allow the twin to spend time with Harry.
You might think that that reunion lead to the realization that the Charlus was now in the world of Harry Potter... but no. In truth that fundamentally discovered when the two babies were already a year old. Growing up with Harry Potter as a twin was, in truth a happy vacation in which Harry did all the work of informing their parents of their needs, and the quiet Charlus Potter supervised his minion *cough* twin's handiwork reaping the benefits of it.
Of course, the relationship was not entirely one-sided: Charlus, quiet as he was, kept a constant eye on Harry, preventing the younger sibling from getting his finger in the magical equivalent of an electric socket, and making sure that the baby didn't eat the bugs he would catch with the innate Seeker reflex that had made him the younger Quidditch Player in a century. All in all, it was an oddly symbiotic relationship between siblings.
...
It wouldn't be until Charlus Potter neared his fifteenth month of life when, like all babies, he developed the capability of long-term memory. The many months that would allow baby Charlus to plan for the Halloween -when Lord Voldemort would kill them with for plot reasons- in a fictional world were reduced to less than a week because that's when Charlus brain had developed enough to allow rational thinking and long term planning.
Which was... too late, really.
Charlus knew not of the date or how old he was beyond the knowledge he was a year old, and the decorations of pumpkin and plastic skeletons he was hopping to use for reference never adorned the walls of Godric Hollow because the Potters were far from being in a festive mood after learning that Alice and Frank had been tortured into insanity by Bellatrix Lestrange, barely avoiding the death of little Neville because he had been left behind with Augusta Longbottom.
...
Halloween 31th 1981
Charlus was a bit constipated, the stress of not knowing the date and not having thought of any plan for survival at all were affecting the baby's bowel movements. The uncomfortable feeling in the baby's tummy made him unable to sleep, and having made a little fuss (which was a big thing for his parents given the baby's personality) Charlus was left in the floor to play for a little longer while Harry was tucked into his crib.
Knowing that Charlus never moved very far when left on the floor and never got into trouble at all, his parents left him there while they went down to the kitchen to warm two bottles of milk for their dinner.
Charlus pilled the wooden blocks for lack of anything else to do-
Then came the scream.
"Lily take Harry and Charlus!"
Charlus, aware of the plot, crawled faster than ever and managed to hide into the closet that had been left half-open. Lily reached the crib and grabbed Harry, her eyes barely getting a chance to sweep the room once and plead for Harry's life before she was hit with the curse that would end her life.
The prophesy took place then, figuratively marking Harry and Voldemort's equal. The corrupted broken soul of Tom Morvolo Riddle floated out of the Dark Lord's body and floated like the gray smoke that came out of Quirrel's body in the first Harry Potter movie.
Charlus got to witness the historical moment, waiting with abated breath to see the piece of soul turn Harry into a Horcrux... only for it to rebound. Charlus gasped and the soul that was starting to die without an anchor spotted the babe in the closet and made a run for it.
It was then that Charlus did something he hadn't done in two days: he shitted himself.
Then, he did something he hadn't done in even longer: he cried. The searing pain in his forehead as a parasite made a home out of his skull was the most painful thing he had ever felt, it was even more painful than dying.
In his agony, Charlus could not help envy Harry for getting knocked out by falling from Lilly's embrace and onto the floor face-first. Getting you dead mom to half-fall on you was surely a lot less painful than what he was going through.
Charlus blinked several times as blood ran down his face. The time slowed down and Charlus' irrational jealousy was put to rest as soon as the soul merge ended.
Despite feeling like crap, the good heart that had prevented his past self from going to hell decided to make itself known just then: Charlus needed to save Harry. So Charlus crawled the short distance using all the strength he had left.
Truth being told, he had no idea how to help, had no plan, no capabilities, no medical knowledge of any worth in this situation. So Charlus stared at Harry and Lilly that were lying there like they were a dead Mufasa hugging Simba after the stampede.
"Harry" Charlus spoke his first word as tears swelled into his eyes.
It was impossible to say how much time passed since Charlus began crying and Rubeous Hagrid arrived into the room and picked both babies up. Charlus cried Harry's name over and over in a hysterical fashion while his vision grew blurrier and blurrier. So much so that he was unable to realize that the house he had grown up in almost collapsed on top of his head.
Charlus felt himself be squeezed by a giant arm as the world blurred in nauseating flashes of hasty movements. The last thing Charlus saw before collapsing into oblivion was the furious face of Sirius Black, the sound of a motorcycle in the background and words he could not make sense off in his grogginess.
...
Rubeous Hagrid, gamekeeper of Hogwarts had been in Dumbledore's office telling the Professor about the need to buy repellent for blood-sucking slugs when a very pale Severus Snape slammed the door of his office open. Although Dumbledore would usually make some dotty remark about candies when in precense of his highly irritable, magically-bound spy, man gave off a feeling of urgency that made the older wizard restrain his tongue.
"I need a private word, headmaster."
"There is no need, Severus, Hagrid has my complete confidence!"
"There is no time for your games, Dumbledore!" Snape, in too much hurry to speak with hidden words and double meanings revealed his left arm, the dark mark that was usually as colorful as a newly made tattoo looked almost completely faded.
Dumbledore's eyes lost their twinkle; this was a serious development.
"I need to know she is safe!" Severus Snape was uncharacteristically agitated, the fear in his eyes a mirror of the one when he stumbled into his office the year before to beg to save his beloved Lilly.
Dumbledore nodded, then ordered the greasy-haired man "go alert The Order..."
Snape wanted to protest, he needed to find her, needed to know she was alive and well, but he knew by the steel in the headmaster's eye that there would be no changing the man's mind and Snape had made an Unbreakable Bow swearing obedience. He couldn't disobey the headmaster's order. And so, Severus Snape left the room first to The Order's headquarters.
"Hagrid," Dumbledore called as soon as he was left alone with the half-giant, "I need you to go to Godric Hollow and see if the Potters are well."
"How about you headmaster?" Hagrid couldn't help but ask.
"There is no time to explain, Hagrid; I need you to trust me now." It was testament to Hagrid faith in Dumbledore didn't question the man any further and disappeared from the headmaster's office through the Floo as soon as the man spoke the direction to him, to allow him to past the Fidelus.
As soon as Dumbledore was out of the room, the ancient wizard called his phoenix and teleported into a flash of flames directly to the Hall of Prophesies. Dumbledore needed to know if the prophesy was truly fulfilled. Such information was crucial at this point in time, for Dumbledore's contacts at the Ministry would finally take action as soon as they could be convinced that Voldemort was no more.
In the end, Dumbledore found the orb. It shone with light as soon as Dumbledore, the one who had heard the Prophesy, took it into his hand. The words of Sylbil Ternalway echoed in the quiet room, then, at the end of it, numbers made of mist floated, showing the day the prophesy was made. The date in which the prophesy was fulfilled, however, wasn't there.
Voldemort wasn't dead.
Armed with such knowledge and ready for might come, Dumbledore teleported towards Hodric Hollow. He was in time to see Hagrid rush out of the house that the Potters had hidden in; or, rather, out of what was left of it.
"Professor," Hagrid called with teary eyes, a sleeping baby in each arm. "Found them in time, the roof almost collapsed on their heads. James and Lilly-"
Before Hagrid could finish a dozen Death Eaters, all of which too loyal to the Dark Lord to think of saving their own skin, teleported outside the ruined home.
Dumbledore got his wand out fast and casted a shield in time to block a vicious looking purple beam. "Hagrid, take the twins!" Dumbledore ordered as he fought valiantly to keep the Death Eaters at bay. Hagrid ran as fast as he could, his long strides somewhat making up for being unable to move at fast speed.
The order members arrived when there was little for them to do other than battle the wounded and take Death Eaters into custody.
...
All evidence in the Potter household pointed to the Death of Lord Voldemort: the surviving babies, the Dark Lord's abandoned wand and the faded dark marks of the Death Eaters. Only Dumbledore knew for a fact Voldemort was alive. Only his order believed him with a complete lack of evidence (the prophesy being too delicate to discuss even with them). He sent them to rest for the night and told them he would summon them the next day.
As delicate secrets tend to do, the news of Voldemort's defeat spread like wildfire in a dry wood. The followers of the Dark Lord that were unmarked and uninformed at that point hid as soon as they heard the news, while those more cunning made plans to weasel out of their deserved punishment by cozying to corrupted ministry members.
And so, while common English Wizards celebrated the end of the war by getting dressed in a rainbow of colors and conjured a rain of stars in the sky, Dumbledore prepared to make choices that would shape the future of the wizardkind.
Dumbledore arrived to Hogwarts long before Hagrid arrived there in Sirius Black flying motorbike. The two babies slept soundly, the high temperature of Hagrid and his thick fur jacked kept them warm enough as they crossed the sky all the way to Hogwarts.
Not needing much prompt, Hagrid reported the meeting Sirius Black, who lent him his flying motorbike while he went to search for "that traitorous rat". Dumbledore knew without a doubt that Peter Pettigrew was the traitor; something that the old wizard already suspected since it was him who casted the Fidelus that the rat animagus was unable to due insufficient magical strength.
As Hagrid explained everything Albus Dumbledore's eyes were fixed on the thunder-shaped scar of Charlus Potter. The Prophesy he had heard barely hours ago echoing in his mind as clearly as if those were being spoken by his ear.
"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies..."
It was then, while standing in front of Hagrid that Dumbledore stood on the crossroad: he could allow Charlus Potter to be raised by Sirius Black, a man who had shown the Black family madness more and more in every meeting of the order; a man who was childish and impulsive to the point of almost causing the death of a fellow student during his student years; a man that could raise their future savior with thoughts of revenge while encouraging the Potter heir to believe himself above the authorities.
Dumbledore would not allow a child with enough power to vanquish Lord Voldemort to grow in an environment that might turn him into a dark lord even more terrible than the one he would put the wizard world in peril.
Sirius Black would not raise Charlus Potter.
As if to agree with Dumbledore's resolve, the fireplace in his office came alive, and the face of Alastor Moody glared from the flames: "Albus! Black murdered Pettigrew. He was the traitor! I had told you that you shouldn't trust anyone from a dark family!"
Hagrid, wide-eyed got red in the face, ready to defend Sirius, but Dumbledore's hand in his shoulder stopped him.
"I will be right there, Alastor." Moody's face vanished from the flames.
"I'm sorry, my friend," Dumbledore spoke to Hagrid, who frowned in confusion at the cryptic apology.
"Obliviate."
...
"Hagrid, Sirius Black betrayed us all. I need you to take Charlus to his aunt's house in Surrey while I deal with some matters at the ministry."
Hagrid blinked twice, getting the funny feeling he had forgotten something. Still, Hagrid nodded obediently, then asked "what about Harry?"
Dumbledore then explained the fate of the second youngest Potter twin. Hagrid's eyes widened in surprise.
To Be Continued
AN: Before you burn me alive for the ending I need to say that I'm keeping mum about Harry's fate not because I'm a sadist, but because I love seeing you squirm... OK, that was a lie. Truth is that I think that until the Charlus learns the truth you will be left wondering along with him.
Also, writting the second hald of this chapter was a pain because I wanted to keep things cannon, but cannon doesn't make sense at all. Have you guys noticed how many potholes there are in the before we reach ch2 in Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone? Let me list a few:
List of Relevant Plotholes
1. Hagrid, who is always at Hogwarts, and cannot apparate arrives to Hodric Hollow to save Harry Potter: how the hell did he knew? He should have no reason to be there at all! And why send him there then if he cannot use magic? Because even if he can, he never truly learnt anything beyond 3rd year material!
2. Hagrid is an original member of the Order of the Phoenix: Now why the hell do you get a blabbermouth into a super-secret organization of vigilantes? Either we have been all fooled by the half-giant from the start or there is a magical enforcing bond we were never told about (which doesn't make sense given that there were traitors in the order). Alas, this fact is cannon, so I'm keeping it, but I still disagree.
3. Hagrid meets Sirius, needs his help to save Harry but doesn't know Sirius is innocent... one of the worstly planned asspulls in the history of fiction.
4. Hagrid NEEDS the motorcycle to get to Privet Drive?: OK, I'm going to pretend it makes sense to need the vehicle as opposed to getting back however he got to Godric Hollow, but, if he went there from Godric Hollow how did he ask the adress? don't tell me he went there knowing the Potters were already dead.
5. Voldemort's wand: lost when Voldemort dies, magically getting back to him on the cemetery when he made a comeback… how the f***? I mean, if anyone other than Pettigrew was there with him Harry would have never survived; if it was the rat, he would run to save his skin when noticing his master fall. Or will someone tell me one of his followers in prison would have it? And no, the ones out wouldn't have it because while Malfoy could get the thing, Voldemort used his own wand to summon his followers in there before Malfoy arrived.
6. Dumbledore should have been the secret keeper: why not? He was the secret keeper to Black Manor, so even if there was an unsaid rule that nobody living in a place under the Fidelus, there was nothing preventing the headmaster from taking the role.
7. Peter Pettigrew casted the Fidelus: How come such a rare piece of magic was casted by such a weak wizard? If so, all purebloods should have some of that; at least those under Dumbledore would be given the knowledge to protect their homes and loved ones. Conclusion: he wasn't the one doing the casting.
I could keep going with the list up to 25 if I list the irrelevant ones at the top of my head, but I think I made my point (I'm all ears if you want to point out more plotholes, though).
Anyway, I really look forwards to reading your reviews.
Given how irregular my updates are, if I don't update by the end of October I will answer anyone who asks me where Harry went in a Private PM.
See you around (^_^)
