-8-
In the aftermath of Gryffindor's failure to get the House Cup this year, all of the Gryffindors were playing the depressed blame game. Many of them were pointing fingers at one another, and in the chaos Harry had slipped away, casting a notice me not charm over himself wandlessly before he snuck out, casting confundus charms on the portraits to add a new layer of security.
On his way to the Room of Requirement, keeping watch over the Marauder's Map as he did so, Harry considered his plans. Ever since he had discovered the Room of Requirement, Harry had been studying the spells and wards Dumbledore had used to trap him at Privet Drive; he'd had plenty of time to study the blood magic, and he'd even conjured teachers to help him with some of his plans, and to learn the ins and outs of the blood magic.
Harry had even summoned a Potter family elf after learning his family had them, and he'd had one of them - a really nice female elf, Mixie - come and take him to Privet Drive…
-8-
Flashback.
-8-
As he stood in the disused classroom, Harry wondered if he was being paranoid; even when he had dispelled all of the tracking charms Dumbledore had put on him, outside of the RoR, he still felt exposed. But he ignored it for now as he prepared for what was to come. A lot of things were hinging on what was going to happen tonight. In the few days since Quirrell's death, the whole school was in an uproar. Nobody knew what happened to the professor, and Harry was certainly not telling.
Ron and Hermione had both been caught out in the Philosopher's Stone trap; Harry had caught, more than once, the looks he got from them, and from Dumbledore and from McGonagall. There was nothing that they could do, but Harry had learnt Dumbledore planned to contact the Dursleys and make sure their abuse stepped up. When he had learnt the first time around Dumbledore was the one responsible for the abuse, and that he was the one having a say in how bad it was, it only made Harry's decision to deal with the old wizard stronger.
The good news was McGonagall, Weasley, and Granger did not know about what their friend/headmaster/mentor was doing. Harry had made sure to get recordings, and he was going to keep them for a rainy day.
Harry pushed those thoughts aside and took a breath.
"Can one of the Potter family House Elves come to me, please?" Harry said.
A pop.
"Master Harry!" The little elf squealed with joy, gazing up at him with enormous blue eyes, which bordered on luminous. Harry liked House Elves, he felt they were better than wizards. "Yous called Mixie."
"Hello," Harry smiled back, kneeling down. "Mixie," he said, trying out the elf's name, and making the little elf beam up at him. "Are there any more House Elves in the Potter family?" He asked, unsure of how to carry on the conversation.
"Oh, yes sir! There's 30 of us," Mixie replied.
Harry sighed with relief. "That's good. Mixie, I need you to listen to me for a moment, just hear me out," he said. And with that, Harry told the elf about his upbringing, and how Dumbledore had imprisoned him in an abusive home. To his surprise, Mixie not only knew about this, but she wailed that Dumbledore had warded Privet Drive to stop any Potter elf from rescuing their young master and giving him a fresh life. Apparently, one elf tried to save him, and Dumbledore had quickly arrived and badly wounded the elf, fatally in fact, and he had added the wards as a result, to stop all Potter elves coming to him.
Upon hearing about how the youngest heir of the Potter family was being treated, the portraits in Potter manor had tried to call upon the House Elves and get them to try to get Harry out of there so he could be raised in the family, but it was too late.
The only way Dumbledore's wards could be broken would be if Dumbledore died, or Harry actually discovered them and summoned them.
Harry was relieved when he heard this. "Mixie, I need to go back quickly to the muggles. Only for a brief visit; I need to know what kind of wards Dumbledore used, so I can fool him. I have no intention of going back there again," he said.
"That's good, young master," Mixie nodded.
Harry wondered if he should make the elves call him something else, but they could work on it. "I'm sorry I didn't call you before, Mixie, I've only just found out about you."
-8-
The trip to Privet Drive was quick and easy, and Harry made a mental note that he would try to ask the House Elves to teach him their form of magic; it seemed to be so much better than what he was used to, and on top of that they used wandless magic. When they arrived, Harry had Mixie call another Elf, who was named Dixie, and after the loud hugs, Harry got them to study the wards around Privet Drive.
"There be blood wards, but they're collapsing," Dixie reported.
Harry wasn't surprised; after hearing how the wards were meant to work, he couldn't help but wonder just what in the name of magic Dumbledore was drinking when he came up with this stupid idea. There was no chance the Dursleys would ever accept him. "Did you find anything else?"
"Yes, young master," Mixie said, "there's a ward powered by your magic."
"So I was protecting myself and them?" Harry frowned while he summed up just what Dumbledore had done. "It didn't do a good enough job," he said while left wondering if he should even bother with the Dursleys now. "I need to think for a moment," he said and he went silent, and thought quickly. "I'm not going to bother with the Dursleys, but I want you both to tell the Potter portraits at the manor that I plan to change my name to Peverell. The goblins came back to me after I learnt it was possible, and the Peverells did eventually become the Potters. I also plan to switch schools. I just wanted to know if I could drop something here, something that would be enough to fool Dumbledore enough to give me a chance to get out of the country."
The two House Elves were stunned by this revelation, but they accepted it.
"You…you won't leave us, master?" Dixie asked timidly.
Harry surprised her by kneeling down and hugging them both to his chest. "Never. You'll still be important, you'll just be Peverell elves soon. I'll ask the goblins about dealing with the Dursleys and the wards. In the meantime, can you both take me back to Hogwarts?"
But before the House Elves could do anything, Harry stopped them as he tried to think of a good way of dealing with the Dursleys for good, "Wait," he said as a thought crossed his mind, one which was both evil and cruel, but since this was the Dursleys, they did not count, "do we have any dungeons at Potter manor?"
-8-
Flashback ends.
-8-
When he walked into the Room of Requirement, Harry smirked, thinking about the glorious moment Dumbledore discovered his plans were going to fall apart around him. He had reached this decision after seeing the future several times, and he had realised if he wanted to end Voldemort, end the Malfoys, he couldn't without causing other important events to either not happen at all.
For a while now, ever since he had decided to largely ignore the Philosopher's Stone, and the collection of coincidences around it, Harry had been debating what to do about the Chamber of Secrets. To try to help, Harry discovered, after seeing different versions of the future, what would and could happen should he change too much… in the end, Harry drove himself mad, as he was starting to see the problems with killing the Malfoys early and everything else. And then he remembered his discovery of Dumbledore's plans and how he'd felt when he was 7 years old.
It was as if a bludger had smashed a crater into his head, but the epiphany struck home. It was like a door had opened, beckoning him inside, away from the tangle of choices. And it was annoying simply because of the fact it was a simple option he had once hoped for but was denied.
But truthfully….why was he bothering with trying to change history so much to begin with and make it follow the pattern it followed when he could just as simply make a huge magnificent change?
As that thought settled, a bitter one took root. Why should he care about the magical world?
Why should he be the only one to fight Voldemort? Why couldn't others do it? Why should Albus Dumbledore say he was the only one who could? And….and…..and, why should he just remain at Hogwarts? It was a terrible school where teachers could bully students whom they were supposed to protect, to nurture. Harry had spent enough time here to know when the elder students left, they had been conditioned to just take crap while the bullies thought they could do whatever they wanted.
One day, that behaviour was going to be their downfall….but Dumbledore did not seem to care. In fact, he only encouraged it, made it worse.
Harry did not understand why. On top of that, after a year of being at Hogwarts, and seeing the education contrasts in other schools, Harry knew what he preferred.
After everything he had seen, Harry knew he was making the right choice to leave the school and go off somewhere else and get an education from there without Dumbledore organising these insane tasks.
In the end, Harry had decided not to even try, and to focus on what he really wanted; to escape. In one of the possible timelines he'd seen, he would be thrown into Azkaban prison for mass murder, or Dumbledore would just give up on him and make his life easier by giving him the chance to end Voldemort for good…but Harry realised all of those events were keyed to one simple truth; he would be staying in Hogwarts. One of his first instincts was to flee the school the moment he saw how he was treated in his second and fourth years, so why not alter the future for good by not attending Hogwarts for his next year?
That was why he had found out if there were ways he could escape. And he could. All he had to do was change his name, after all Albus Dumbledore was guardian to Harry Potter, not Harry Peverell. Harry didn't care about his connection to the Potter name. It was only a name, but he had learnt names meant power, one of the reasons he had gone for the Peverell name instead. The only people who'd know about it and its connection to him would be his account manager and the House Elves.
But he had one last favour to ask the Room of Requirement. He needed to know how to recreate the Room of Requirement somewhere else since he couldn't depend on this one unless he had no choice. If he had a Room by himself, he would have the same possibilities but he wouldn't need to keep coming here. His trunk, once full of books about essence transfer, immortality, time travel, parallel universes, magical physics, and the arcane branches of magic, such as alchemy, and soul magic along with some of the more conventional forms of magic, like potions, was now empty; all of his stolen books were at Potter Manor now he had that as a resource. He could go there, but he couldn't claim headship until his 17th birthday.
"I want to know how the Room of Requirement works so I can replicate the magical nature of the Room," Harry said out loud, picturing a book, or a pile of books giving the instructions, "I want to know more about this magic."
Instead of a book, Harry received the knowledge in a totally different way. He gasped as knowledge passed into his mind. Whispers of a different mind, memories of a witch passed into his head. He gasped as the name Rowena Ravenclaw crossed his mind. And she was delighted someone was even asking for this knowledge.
The magical theory passed into Harry's head, spell formulas and the charm work, interdimensional theory entered his head. Suddenly everything became clear to him. Finally, it ended, leaving him staggering around. But the new knowledge sparked his mind like never before, and he wanted more and more. When he asked for the knowledge of Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, and Slytherin, he got it.
Why no one had ever done this before, Harry didn't understand. But he was going to become the greatest wizard in the world, without the help of Hogwarts.
Deciding to be cheeky, he asked for the knowledge of Merlin as well.
Now he was being greedy. But it was good. While he might have combined knowledge of some of history's most powerful wizards and witches, Harry knew he could do so much more, so much better, and he wanted to do so much better than ever before.
-8-
The trip back to London was..surreal; while Ron and Hermione kept speaking to him like they were the best of friends, and not spying on him to learn what he was thinking, something he despised, Harry, who was still reeling from the mental download, did catch one or two excited looks from Weasley, and these were fairly dark. Last night, he'd done some late-night checking on the spies when he saw they were in Dumbledore's office, and he listened in while the spies were speaking to Dumbledore and McGonagall; after the two witches left after a seemingly routine meeting, Dumbledore confessed he planned on making sure the Dursleys were more abusive, and the Weasel liked the sound of it. Harry had gotten into the habit of recording those meetings, and having Mixie or one of the other elves take them, and put them in the office in Potter Manor for safekeeping.
He was looking forward to using them.
Harry was used to hearing the hate from Weasley, and the growing contempt in Granger's voice whenever they reported about him and his activities; it was clear while Granger felt he was a friend, deep down she pitied him for being so stupid. Now he wondered how long it would be before she learnt about the Dursleys and their abuse. He didn't know, didn't care.
It was surreal because it was clear Ron knew about his home life, but he was still a jerk about the whole Harry Potter thing, but it wouldn't matter in the long run.
"Where's Hedwig?" Hermione asked.
"I sent her on ahead," Harry replied, keeping his real reasons to himself. "It's such a lovely day, I felt she would prefer being out in the open air than being trapped in a cage for hours."
"But we'll be reaching King's Cross soon."
"Hedwig is my owl, I can let her go out and fly if I want to; she's not stupid, she will find me," Harry's eyes narrowed with growing suspicion and irritation at the questions. He laced his words with magic to shut them both up and forget it.
Ignoring the crowd when they reached King's Cross, Harry got off the train and he deliberately lost himself. After a bit of hiding and some work removing the tracking spells and transfiguring the trunk, changing his appearance, and making himself unnoticed, Harry left the station. He noted several people keeping watch, even dimly recognising one or two from the times where someone shook his head or spoke to himself so openly, and he guessed they were in Dumbledore's employ. Knowing they would be making notes about whether or not the Dursleys were here, Harry stepped around them.
This was one of the reasons he had made Hedwig leave before the school cleared out. She was too recognisable. But since he was completely different in appearance, he slipped by them, wondering how long it would be before they asked where the Dursleys were. They would never guess. After all, in a way, he would be with them, just not on the terms Dumbledore wanted.
He didn't care.
-8-
Changing his name at Gringotts was straightforward enough. Even better, he supplied the goblins and the solicitors with proof (they did ask him how he got it, but he told them he had found a way) of the misdemeanours Dumbledore perpetrated; wards that used his magic, compulsions on muggles, bribes on muggles, threats on muggles - all to abuse a magical child with damning evidence of said abuse, espionage - theft of letters from well-wishers, bank statements, compulsion charms and tracking charms placed on Harry Potter, but the worst was best left to last.
Paying the Weasleys to spy and befriend him. Line theft by illegally getting guardianship over him, and making out a marriage contract between himself and Ginny Weasley. Theft of Potter family money, books, and artefacts.
The illegal ways Dumbledore had just assumed guardianship were telling, especially since Lily and James, particularly Lily had not wanted Dumbledore near her child, and James had suddenly followed suit, but if they'd had plans for something big to happen, nobody could say, but it would be the first thing he would check on when he was at Potter Manor, or had the new Room of Requirement up. Harry knew he couldn't have a full room crafted, but he decided to make things smaller, and simpler. It was a bit like comparing the TARDIS to the DeLorean Time Machine; both worked perfectly, but the car was simpler, and easier to handle. Why not adopt the same philosophy, and keep everything simple?
Harry decided to transform a simple watch into his new RoR, but he would call it the Time Watch. Not the best name, but it would work.
-8-
During the weeks that followed, the magical world was thrown into utter chaos and turmoil as Harry's actions reached the ears of everyone as the solicitors, armed with their evidence, suddenly destroyed Dumbledore's image. But when you destroy such a powerful figure, there is bound to be a lot of chaos. Even worse, thanks to the goblins and the DMLE, ignoring Dumbledore's attempts to prevent it from happening, and they went to Privet Drive.
What was made public was horrific, and it changed not only the image of the Boy Who Lived forever, but also served as a massive victory for the blood supremacists worldwide, which had never been Dumbledore's long-term plans. Detailed reports of child abuse - mental and physical which was bad enough, but against the heir of an old magical family it was the worst of the worst, coercion of muggles using compulsion charms, memory charms used to erase memories from muggles who actually recognised the abuse while filling their brains with disgust towards Harry who was an innocent while tracking charms and memory spells were used on Harry himself - came out.
Worse were the memories he managed to recover. Harry had used the occlumency training he had picked up from the Room to find the memories of his earlier attempts to get away from the Dursleys, and they were telling. Even worse was how in one Fawkes flashed in front of him and took him back to where Dumbledore was there, waiting for him, saying it was for the greater good he forgot. That wording had a surprising impact, and Harry learnt it was the slogan of Gellert Grindelwald, the Dark Lord whom Dumbledore was credited for defeating. So many were stunned and outraged that Dumbledore would even use such a phrase to justify such evil.
But Harry had a nasty idea. Seeing a potential opportunity to cause more damage to Dumbledore's image, Harry got Mixie to take him back to the Room of Requirement in Hogwarts while he worked on the Time Watch, and when he came out again he immediately and anonymously sent copies of memories of Dumbledore and Grindelwald fighting on the Dumbledore property where Ariana was killed, and Dumbledore's mistreatment of the young woman, and even the way they had formed a fake blood pact and how Dumbledore even plotted his own friend's downfall as he sorrowfully realised only he had the truest way of ruling the world of wizards while muggles were enslaved.
That caused an explosion Dumbledore and his lackeys could not escape from.
Harry just ignored it all. Letters were sent out, but many were layered with spells and others filled with potions, many of them fatal ones, but he had them sent off to the DMLE to take care of. He was simply too busy with preparations to go to a different magical school. He had chosen to spend the next couple of years at different schools; he would spend a year at Uagadou, a year at Beauxbatons, a year at Mahoutokoro before he moved to Castelobruxo for a year, and then he planned to finish off at Ilvermorny. He wanted to experience the best of a complete magical education instead of just being in one single school, without anyone interfering in his affairs.
Everything was so hectic and Harry was left extremely busy making the final arrangements, he had forgotten something important about the unaltered timeline.
Dobby.