To Vanquish a Dark Lord

By: EDelta88

Rated M for language, violence, adult themes, and general safety.

[Insert Disclaimer Here]


Background and Beginning Notes:

This one is a little… different. This started as a thought experiment spawned from one too many stories where Voldemort was inexplicably not such a bad guy or all his misdeeds just got swept under the metaphorical carpet as he turned over a new leaf. Many of the stories made very little sense to me and I became incredibly frustrated after a particularly lazy FemHarryxVoldemort story and started piecing out how I would do it if I ever felt masochistic enough to make an attempt myself.

In short: How do you redeem Lord Voldemort?

First and foremost, on some level Tom needs to understand that he fucked up. Acknowledging that there is a problem is the first step toward a better tomorrow. Second, he has to suffer for his own redemption. Unearned rewards are worse than him just being unrepentant and bulldozing his way toward a better tomorrow in my opinion. There are a few more but those are the two big ones. The problem is that Tom has done a lot of unforgivable (literally) nonsense and no amount of wump and torture is going to undo the damage he's done… unless he never did it in the first place!

So, the result is: "How do I redeem Lord Voldemort? Erase his misdeeds!"

So, yeah, time travel! Who could have possibly seen that coming? It seemed so cliché that I just shelved the whole thing for years. Then I read one too many "Harry time traveled but surprise! Voldemort came too. Aren't I original?" stories and decided this was the perfect time (pun intended) to highjack and butcher a tired trope out of spite. End result, this is the result of my brain diving down a rabbit hole and finding a dystopic Wonderland to play in where Tom Riddle gets a wakeup call and tries (keyword) to set things right… with mixed results.


Prologue

British Ministry of Magic, April 2001...

Bang!

"Are you out of your bloody mind!" Juniper Potter roared as she stalked into Lord Voldemort's offices.

Lord Voldemort blinked, flabbergasted as the Girl-Who-Lived stormed into his office bold as brass, as if she wasn't the most wanted woman in all of magical Europe. "Have you come to kill me, Juniper?" he asked, taking in her well-worn battle robes with interest as he idly wondered if his men were dead or simply incapacitated. Bone white for mourning accented by patches of bloody crimson, how appropriate.

"Would you stay dead if I did?" she snarled.

"Unlikely," he replied, enjoying the vicious scowl she leveled at him. It was really quite impressive. He was sure lesser men would soil themselves in terror.

"Then no, I'm here to tell you that you need to fix this!"

"Fix… what exactly?"

"The breach of the Statute, you bloody fucking maniac!" she cried as she absently cursed one of his bodyguards that unwisely attempted to approach her, sending him rocketing out of the office and crashing into… several things from the sound of it.

Voldemort sneered. "Muggles are a scourge upon the world. Just look at all they've done to it. What they do to each other every day. They're like unruly children given just enough power to get themselves killed. I'm just… helping things along. Nipping the problem in the bud before they can manage to permenantly damage the planet."

"So, you waltz in front of a camera and explode things like the worst kind of Griffindor?!" she shouted as more of his men arrived. "Fuck off!" Juniper practically howled, the sheer force of her rage throwing the men back as she conjured a glowing wall of magically reinforce granite.

Voldemort quirked a brow at his guest before offering his minions an apathetic glare. That really had been a pathetic show of force, he would need to… discipline them later.

But that would have to wait, because Juniper Potter was far from finished with him.

"If you wanted to deal with the muggles, you should have acted like the Slytherin you pretend to be and used fucking mind control, you utterly imbecilic, braindead, posturing chode!" Juniper hissed. "At least then there would be some plausible deniability!"

"Oh?" he responded, intrigued. "Not taking the moral high ground? Albus would be so disappointed in you, my dear."

What she told him then would stick with him for the rest of his unnaturally long life.

"There is no high ground to take," Juniper snarled to him, leaning over his desk so that they were practically nose to nose as she glared into him.

Voldemort found himself without words, strangely captivated as she spoke.

"War has its own moral code," she hissed, staring into him like she wanted to carve her words directly into his mind. "Know what it is? It's to do unto others before they do unto you. Because, when it comes down to it, war isn't about who's right. War is about who is left."

Voldemort stared at her, his prophesized nemesis, fascinated by this new side of her. Where were the spiteful quips? The demands for justice? Where was Dumbledore's righteous child? Where was the hero of the Wizarding World?

When had she grown up?

"And, just in case you've somehow forgotten?" she continued, unaware or uncaring of the way her enemy was studying her. "If there is one thing on this gods forsaken earth that muggles are very, very good at, it is war."

The faraway sound of air raid sirens and the phantom explosions of German bombs echoed in his ears.

"So, you are going to find a way to fix this! I don't care how you do it. You're the spirits blighted genius of the two of us. So, figure it out!" she snarled at him. "Because, if you don't? You've killed us all, Voldemort."


Chapter 1: A Broken Clock

"Terrible things happen to wizards who meddle with time." -Albus Dumbledore

January, 2003...

He had not, in fact, fixed the metaphysical "it." This was, however, not for lack of trying. It seemed that he had well and truly cocked things up because no matter what he tried, he could not overcome the muggles. Nor could he put the proverbial genie back in the bottle. He had underestimated, of all things, muggle communications. That damn internet of theirs. No matter what he did to wipe out knowledge of wizarding kind, it just kept coming back and, as time went on, the muggles just kept getting better and better and dealing with them.

His foe's words had seemed prophetic… except that, somehow Juniper Potter had kept doing what she did best and saved the day. Even as things escalated horribly out of control, not a week had gone by without her raiding a concentration camp or sabotaging some muggle military action. There was always a story of some battle, some great deed, or other brazen shenanigans.

Her sheer defiance had become the stuff of legends.

And then? Then she had done something that he never would have expected, something so out of character that he had not been able to comprehend what was happening until the work was finished. Juniper Potter forced a truce. However, she had not done it with rousing speeches and appeals to the goodness in her enemies. No, she had forged an uneasy peace by presenting the muggles with the heads of every man, woman, and child that had ever served Lord Voldemort in any capacity and promised for all to hear that she would do the same to them and theirs if they did not agree.

It had been bold!

It had been audacious!

It had been absolutely Gryffindor in its sheer impudence and yet positively… Slytherin in its ruthless utility. Had he not been on the receiving end of her little master stroke, he would have declared it a thing of beauty.

Unfortunately, he had been on the receiving end of Juniper's gambit. His armies were gone. His power base now lay in shambles. And for what? A temporary ceasefire with people who would see his kind dead or enslaved. Juniper wouldn't live forever and when she passed…

Well, it didn't take an especially creative mind to picture what would happen when that day came.

But, if Voldemort had his way, all of that would soon change. If he was successful tonight, he would be able to wipe away the consequences of his hubris and the poison he had unintentionally sown in his misguided quest for power. Most would think him mad. Many did, in fact. He himself was not entirely convinced of his own sanity. Because what he was considering? It could only be described as madness. Such an undertaking would be the work of a lifetime! No, the work of generations! No matter how this ended, the magical world—indeed, all of humanity would be living with the consequences of his mistakes for a very, very long time.

Lord Voldemort had nothing but time… and time itself would be his redemption.

Time travel magic is a very odd subject, even for wizards. Make no mistake, time travel is a very possible phenomenon. In fact, one could almost say it was a common occurrence. Tom Riddle had known this for quite a long time, since his youth, in fact. The invention of the Time-Turner had been very big news, after all. That said, wizarding society had never found a means to actually change history, merely become part of it. It was believed that history was immutable, fixed, unchanging…

Lord Voldemort knew better.

In a time when he had still been Tom Riddle, he had stumbled upon the truth quite by accident. He couldn't be bothered to remember what he had actually been researching at the time, but what he did remember was a most interesting pattern hiding between the pages of Hogwarts: A History.

It all started with a picture of a student named Feris Blud.

It had been the little things that caught his attention. A hairstyle that wasn't quite right, a posture that seemed out of place… and a watch that would not be produced for nearly fifty years.

How peculiar he had thought. How strange.

Tom Riddle had always enjoyed a good mystery.

So, he had begun to dig. By all accounts, Feris Blud had been a rather boring human being. He had transferred to Hogwarts quite unexpectedly at the age of seventeen and performed just well enough to be allowed to sit his NEWTs. He had played no sports, participated in no clubs, and appeared to have been something of a recluse. He had then received average scores for his NEWTs and seemingly vanished…

Until he invented the Blood Replenishing potion just in time to treat the hundreds of thousands of witches who fell victim to a misfired blood ritual that cursed any related to the Rosiers who fell pregnant. It had been an ugly thing, causing massive, uncontrollable hemorrhaging in its victims. Once the cause of the affliction was discovered, the Department of Mysteries had managed to isolate the source of the curse quickly enough, but it had taken several years to break it. Without the Blood Replenishing potion to see the victims through childbirth… the losses would have been catastrophic.

Feris Blud… an obvious pseudonym in hindsight.

Tom Riddle had kept digging. What he had found was astonishing. An "eccentric" individual with a name uncommon to the time. An article of clothing that only became popular decades after the photo was taken. In one instance, he was quite sure that the subject was wearing a jersey from a quidditch team that wouldn't be founded until years after the picture was taken.

Some names were more familiar than others. However, in every case he found, there was a matching event of some significance. Most common were discoveries years ahead of their time but, more than once, Tom had found evidence of political intervention, noble sacrifices… and assassination.

After extensive research, he had come to a single inescapable conclusion.

The reason why there was never any progress in the field of time travel magics was because anyone who ever made any real progress had an agenda. They had something they wanted to change and, inevitably, used what they had learned to travel through time taking the secrets of their research with them into the past and then to the grave.

The truth was that people accomplished world-altering time travel throughout the course of history. They were quite visible in fact. They were men and women, witches and wizards, who became some of the most celebrated or vilified personas of their time. For better or worse, each and every one of them changed the course of history… and Lord


Many, Many Years Later…

Lord Voldemort had never truly appreciated the stars. At least, he couldn't remember a time that he did. Maybe when he was younger? Perhaps he had appreciated them in a time before he could remember. Perhaps his resentment of the late-night astronomy classes had robbed him of the simple delight the points of light inspired in most people. Who knew?

But tonight…

Tonight Lord Voldemort stared at the sky with no other purpose than to appreciate the natural beauty of the world one last time. Because if he was careless tonight, he might not get the chance to do so again.

'Arithmetically, I won't get a better opportunity for decades,' the old Dark Lord mused as he carefully scanned the area around him, inspecting his work. The rune matrix and ritual circle that covered the plateau was… massive. Thousands upon thousands of glyphs had been painstakingly carved into solid stone before being filled with a carefully prepared mix of his own blood and the sands of time. A lifetime of plumbing the depths of magic, years of focused research, and months of tedious labor and preparation culminated in what very well could be the most impressive work of magic he would ever cast… in this life or the next.

Truth be told, most of this had nothing to do with time travel and everything to do with preserving Lord Voldemort as he attempted to time travel.

"Terrible things happen to wizards who meddle with time…"

As much as he hated Albus Dumbledore, even a broken clock was right twice a day, and, as much as he was loathe to admit it, the old bastard had not lacked for intelligence. What was more, on the topic of walking where only the truly mad and desperate dared to tread, Lord Voldemort was inclined to agree with his old foe… not that he ever planned to tell anyone that particular detail.

It was mind-boggling how many ways he had found one could die or otherwise suffer horrifically in the course of his experiments. Because it was only prudent to experiment when one intended to access a space outside of space that they had no experience with. Especially since the Unspeakables' notes on the subject included innumerable instances of violent and explosive dismemberment. However, even with that foreknowledge…

The space between spaces? No atmospheric conditions he could measure! His first subjects hadn't so much died from the lack of air as the pressure difference popping them like balloons.

Time? Time itself was a problem. If his calculations were off even in the slightest he could move time through his subjects instead of moving them through time. He'd lost count of how many test subjects had simply deaged out of existence!

Location! Oh, location had been embarrassing. At first, he'd thought he'd been losing subjects only to find one of the rats he'd been using at the time on the news as it had apparently been found embedded in a wall somewhere in Paris. He had felt quite stupid for forgetting that the damn planet was also moving.

Divorcing the subject of the travel from the timeline without destroying them so that they could actually change its course without creating a paradox? It was like aiming with a slingshot while riding a raging hippogriff through a hurricane and viewing the world in two dimensions.

But he had persevered. He had continued his research… and he had succeeded.

Now?

Now he was ready.

And all it would cost him… was immortality.

Voldemort thought now of his empty Horcruxes and once again lamented that he would not be able to bring his treasures with him. Perhaps he would reclaim them in time but to part with them at all was simply maddening. Unfortunately, it was completely unavoidable if he wanted to succeed.

"Sacrifices must be made," he muttered lowly as he watched the shadow of the earth slowly begin to eclipse the Full Moon.

It was time.

The greatest Dark Lord since the Lady Morgana began to chant, spinning the spidery words of his spell into a dizzying web of magic as the world grew dark around him. Slowly, the runes carved into the stone begin to glow. On and on he chants, his voice echoing strangely in the open space as the light from the runes becomes brighter and brighter until they would put the sun to shame. Then, with the last line of the complex incantation, the moon vanished completely into the Earth's shadow and Lord Voldemort turned his wand on himself, facing his greatest fear.

"Avada Kedavera!" he commanded.

As the world came to an end, Lord Voldemort, the man who would once more be known as Tom Riddle, vanished into the past…

As always, death followed close behind.


Wools Orphanage, June 1942…

In a darkened room a pair of blue eyes snap open, taking in their surroundings. But it was dark, no lights were lit for fear of the German bombers, so London was blanketed in a darkness so complete that the only light came from the stars outside.

Tom Riddle blinked, staring at the moonless sky as an odd thought struck him. Normally the lights of London made it impossible to see the stars. Likely, as a child, he had never had the opportunity to see more than a few pinpricks of light in the sky at night… Until the Blitz.

Perhaps that was why he'd never liked the stars.

'A new moon,' he observed, just barely able to pick out its silhouette against the inky blackness of the night sky. 'How appropriate,' he mused with a joyless smile as he closed his eyes in exhaustion.

In the morning, he had work to do.