Harry sat in a regular office chair while a person across from him thumped a stamp on some papers. "So Ron killed me?" Harry spoke up finally after a few minutes or years sitting in quiet contemplation after being shown his last moments alive. "Ron killed me in my sleep?"
"I just showed you how you died," the person said as they continued to do paperwork.
"But why?" Harry said in confusion. "I mean… why, we just won the war, everything was going to be better?"
"Was it?" the person hummed with a smirk. "Harry Potter, it has been almost a quarter century since your death. I can show you all the better that has come about."
"I've been dead that long?!" Harry gasped because he was pretty sure he'd only been here a few minutes, like the last time.
"It's taken that long just to get through all the paperwork Young Man," the person waggled their finger at him. "You kicked up a lot of trouble when you died, again."
Harry could feel the displeasure in this person's voice at that again. Oh there was clear irritation for having to speak of it.
"But that's for later let us show you just what this world became," the person put on a fake smile and ran their hand over the top of the desk.
Harry watched how the announcement of his passing led to more grief for the people that thought it was finally over. But over the next few months of the ministry putting itself back together, he could see that they weren't trying to improve, just to simply return to normal.
The Death Eaters with money bribed their way out, because the ministry was broke and a broken ministry can't pay its workers, and workers who can't put food on their table don't work. So they had to let the Death Eaters go free just to pay for the aurors that they would have needed to arrest them in the first place. And it wasn't just the Death Eaters, the giants, werewolves, vampires, hags, snatchers, everyone who had fought for Voldemort were still out there and he watched Kingsley drink his way through a bottle of bourbon after taking the money because if he waited for too long they'd flee the country or form up again on their own under a new leader.
Harry understood that just because there was no Voldemort did not mean there were not still some powerful dark wizards who might have been biding their time.
"So now there's more Dark Lords?" Harry looked up from the vision as he couldn't watch Kingsley debase his morals any further.
"Oh Mr. Potter, there were always more Dark Lords, Grindelwald was not the first and Riddle not the last, but Dumbledore and yes, you were a deterrent to them," the person chortled at the question.
"Dumbledore? And I was a deterrent?" Harry shook his head.
"Of course, Albus Dumbledore as mixed up a man he was, had publicly defeated Grindelwald in the forties, this made a lot of wanna-be dark lords bide their time because he was so powerful. And then you came along, you killed the worst one yet and now they were all wary," the person answered. "After all Dumbledore was an old and skilled wizard but that's all they saw him as, you had a power. Something that no one understood, that was scarier to them because, what if they tried to take over and it happened again. If they went after more babies who did what you did, or if they tried to get rid of you and you took them out."
"I was a wild card," Harry realized because it was obvious what you'd get when you crossed wands with Albus Dumbledore, but with a young Harry Potter, no one would know the outcome.
"Exactly, now that you are gone, there's no one to keep them from plotting."
"But there are still strong witches and wizards out there, they can fight them off," Harry stated because he knew that others could take up the fight.
"But they weren't you, weren't as strong as you, in magic or character, and everyone knew that. No normal person could fight as hard as you and still keep getting up," the person shook their head. "Sure, they might be able to handle some of the problems but they lacked something that was needed, something special."
"I wasn't special," Harry denied.
Nodding their head the person smiled again. "Oh but you were, and the others could see it, they might have known more spells that you, had more resources than you, done things you'd never consider. But you still won. The dark lords knew they couldn't rely on numbers or fancy spells or trying to outmaneuver you with politics, that was shown to fail. They would have to take the fight to you directly and they knew it was a losing battle. So they already lost before it began."
Wanting to protest that he really was just lucky but Harry figured that he'd just be arguing in circles at that point. "Hey what's all this?" Harry asked as the visions had continued while they talked.
"Oh that's the reading of your will," the person informed.
"But I don't have a will?" Harry mentioned as he saw many people, some he didn't even recognize in the crowd.
"Exactly, and what do you think happens to all of your stuff then?" presenting the question for Harry to answer as he saw it all unfold.
People were yelling and screaming at each other just to get a little more for themselves, his belongings taken and passed around like candy from a dish. His gold was being given out to anyone he'd 'wronged' in the past, which just about anyone who made up a story was getting something, Rita Skeeter, Justin Finch-Fletchly, Draco Malfoy. Even his friends weren't keeping their hands off his stuff. Hermione had gotten the deed to Grimmauld Place, Ron walked away with his cloak and broom. Mrs. Weasley had sacks of galleons.
He looked away when the group of people started threatening each other over who would get his wand.
"Okay so everyone got a little crazy after the war, it doesn't mean anything," Harry tried to reason with the person who rolled their eyes and fast forwarded the visions.
Watching as the Wizengamot had their meeting, Harry sat in horror as new laws, more 'effective' laws were put in place. Because the werewolves lead by Fenrir Greyback had turned so many more innocent victims into werewolves, having his pack go out and attack dozens of people each full moon, a new registration was made and all werewolves were required to come to a detention camp for the duration of the transformation.
But there was never enough Wolfsbane potion to go around, and feral werewolves mixed with those in control resulted in extreme violence. "No TEDDY!" Harry screamed as he watched a ministry official rip his godson out of the hands of Andromeda. He was given a dose of potion and put in the pens with the others. A little one year old that didn't last five minutes. "Oh god, Oh god! Stop it. Please, please STOP IT!" Harry screamed himself raw as he watched a feral werewolf tear the screaming baby apart limb by limb.
Once the vision blurred or maybe it was the tears dripped off his face did he sit down. "Those monsters, those fucking monsters. I wasn't there to protect him, and they killed my boy." Harry snarled and raged as he picked up a chair and threw it as far as he could in the white void. Once he turned around there was another chair where the last had been.
Harry's shoulders were heaving with every deep angry breath he took before he pitched over and vomited onto the ground. "My godson was sent to die by the ministry's orders."
The person at the desk didn't do anything but shrug and that made Harry want to do nothing more than lunge across the desk and punch them in the face as hard as he could. "It wouldn't do anything Mr. Potter, you are dead and I am not subject to that in the first place, I cannot be injured," the person flatly informed the deceased as the visions changed again. "But if it's any consolation your reaction was similar to another's at your passing."
Sitting at the table Harry looked down and saw another bill get passed. All creatures had to be controlled while in public, the vampires fed with abandon during Voldemort's reign and the Giants had gone back to their man-eating ways. The vision split in two and Harry watched on one side as Hagrid, his first friend in the magical world, was placed in heavy shackles and chains. He could barely walk as he tried to teach his students about the magical creatures but when Malfoy acted up and Hagrid went to chastise him for being foolish the chains brightened and forced him to the ground unable to move.
On the other end, Harry watched Bill and Fleur get dressed up to go out, but after she finished putting on her earrings and doing her eyeliner, Bill came over. Slapping cuffs and a bolted collar around her neck before attaching the chains as he walked her out behind him. "Oh right, wand," Bill said to Fleur who blushed and slowly handed the stick over to her husband.
However unlike with Hagrid, this didn't end right away, Harry watched as the years sped before his eyes until it slowed and he could see that a pregnant Fleur was still wearing the chains even in her own home, he saw a little girl of only a few years sitting on the floor in chains with Bill just casually sitting down in a recliner. "Wait is that?" Harry gasped as he saw on the mantle a broken wand, he knew it was Fleur's as it was the same as the one she used during the tournament.
And Fleur looked dead, she was alive obviously, but her eyes were sunken in and before she looked like the sun, radiant, beautiful but now as she shuffled over with a platter of food he could tell she her spirit was broken
"Beel, could we… please, our daughter has never seen her homeland, never seen her grandmama, please, I'll never ask for another thing again, but she should-" Fleur whimpered before the plate of food was pitched and shattered against the wall next to her head.
"Our daughter has a family here, Britain is her home, never," Bill snarled as he stood up. "Make demands of me again."
"Beel I was just," Fleur tried to reason with her husband before she was knocked to the floor by a slap.
"I am your master, not your husband, I'm going out. Clean this up," Bill shouted as he stomped out of the home as Fleur cried on the floor. After the door slammed shut her little girl came crawling over and hugged her mommy which only made Fleur cry harder.
"Fleur," Harry said sadly as he watched her break into pieces. Time sped up and the woman just shrank more and more, she stopped dressing up nicely, she didn't do more than work as a slave to her husband, her daughter learned this and by the time she was ready to go to Hogwarts, she was entirely subservient.
Victoire Weasley returned back to Hogwarts after her first year pregnant. Harry was forced to see the older boys push her into a broom closet and use her over and over, day after day and the veela child never said a thing. She grew up in a household where it was normal for a wizard to control a creature like her, to be used by men.
"Please stop," Harry's voice cracked as irreparable damage was done to this family. "My friends, surely my friends."
He was practically pleading to be shown a sliver of hope that the world was not simply returning to how things were, or worse adjusting to the normal that Voldemort had tried to cement in their lives.
The vision shifted to show Hermione scribbling away in a study, clearly in Grimmauld Place. The witch's quill snapped and Hermione let out a screech of frustration. "This damn bill won't write itself," the woman stood up. "Kreacher!"
The old elf hobbled into the room. "Yes Mistress?" weakly responding.
"I need more muggle blood, get me some samples," Hermione went over to another stack of notes.
"Mistress the muggles in the basement are dry," Kreacher cringed and stepped.
"I didn't ask for excuses, after you finish choking yourself, go get me some more muggles and keep them alive this time," Hermione ordered as Kreacher's hands snapped to his throat and he gagged.
"She's kidnapped muggles?" Harry asked the person as he watched the scene transition to show the basement. In it a stack of rotting corpses piled high to the ceiling was in the corner.
"She wanted to prove that muggleborns were not lesser than purebloods and to prove that she needed to find where magic was in the human genetic code," the person explained the reasoning. "Except magic is not science, you won't find it that way, humans will never find it like that. And the more they try the more it will elude them."
"So she's driving herself mad and in doing so becoming like the people she despised to do it."
Harry sat in silence as the person continued. Years were going by and Harry saw that they had erected a statue for him, a statue that was getting defaced by graffiti and no one cared. "Is that the barest hint of an ego I sense in you," the person snorted because that was the closest Harry Potter had manifested an emotion that was related to selfishness this entire time.
Harry shot the person a glare and huffed before watching as a person approached.
"This statue to commemorate that wanker Harry Jerk Potter," Ron Weasley slurred as he poured out the rest of the brown beer bottle onto the placard before unzipping his pants to piss on the stone. "Fuck you, how the fuck are you still ruining my life after all these years."
"The bloody hell is he whining about?" Harry scoffed in annoyance that the person who killed him was still holding a grudge. "God, it's Snape all over again."
"For the entire time I was your friend I was always living in your shadow. So I was glad when you died. But you know what pisses me off the most, even after that, I'm still there. You didn't cast a shadow, you blocked out the sun."
Harry couldn't believe what he was hearing, Ron was the one that after killing him rested on his laurels, he didn't bother training when he was presented the option to be an auror and ended up bungling more than his fair share of arrests by not doing the paperwork properly. This resulted in more criminals going free on technicalities and he'd even gotten his fellow officers hurt by not taking the job seriously.
"Did anyone, anyone at all do good," Harry said in defeat.
"Those that did, not for long, they left and never came back," the person shrugged to show that Neville's parents had expired in St. Mungos after the hospital was too overwhelmed that some patients had to be let go in a sense, it had been near on two decades and they couldn't afford to spend the resources to keep them alive when they had no end in sight to the victims of this war. After that Neville had no reason to stick around. Harry saw him sitting in a crappy muggle apartment black out drunk.
Luna had gone off in a search for magical creatures and just disappeared, without friends or a family once her father had taken his own life for his crushing guilt of betraying Harry to attempt to save his daughter. So it didn't surprise Harry that she'd just go off into the wilderness.
"What about Hogwarts, was it ever restored?" Harry inquired as to the fate of the last place he cared about.
With a dismissive wave the person behind the desk showed the castle, still damaged after all these years, a nearly barren monument as the population numbers never recovered. Classes held maybe six or seven students at a time. The number of young magicals killed in Tom's rampage left an entire gap in the generation that might never be filled.
Harry watched as Minerva McGonagall went about her days teaching students who didn't care about magic and just trying to keep the problems to a minimum, the replacements for all the staff members lost didn't seem to care either. The school was barely that, more akin to a boarding house to send your troublesome children to so you didn't have to put up with them.
The scene focused on a little boy who was nervously going around to his lessons before spending time in the library, and even defending some other students from bullies. "I don't know who this is?" Harry commented because he'd never seen this child before, but they looked somewhat familiar.
"That is Harry Vernon Dursley, your nephew," the person grinned.
"Dudley's son is a wizard?" Harry said in amazement.
"Oh yes, and he named his son in memory of you because he'd learned what happened in the war. You the selfless young boy who didn't deserve the cruelty he was given, by his own family. That is your cousin's greatest regret that he couldn't have been nicer so he made sure that his son was raised with love, never called a freak, taught about his amazing Uncle who was a better man than he was who saved the world."
"Harry Dursley was raised to know that bullying was wrong, and to always fight back against them because if you don't who will, he was raised to be brave and always try his best, to give to others when he could, it didn't last long."
"No please," Harry's lip quivered in fear of what he'd see next, he just wanted once to see something good happen since his death.
"It didn't take long for others to learn of who he was related to. Your nephew, your cousin and his wife were killed by a dark wizard before he graduated. Someone wanted to make sure that what you became never happened again, your cousin died defending his family to his last breath."
Running the hand backwards the person looked at Harry in minutes of silence. "And The Death of Harry James Potter heralded The End of the Magical Empire of Britannia."
"Oh," Harry said apologetically.
And for the first time the person actually seemed to emote, to feel something other than benign amusement at what horrible visions they could reveal. "OH! That's all you have to say is OH! You had something everyone who has ever come through here has asked for, and it was stolen from you by a jealous man tainted by that foul horcrux."
"Everyone?" Harry raised an eyebrow as surely some people were content with their deaths.
"EVERYONE!" the person's voice boomed in the aether.
"But you got it and you accepted your death not once, but twice," the person shook their head in disgust.
"Well what do you want from me? Was this all just torture for me? To show how I screwed everything up? Did my failure warrant me to exist in this hell you have made?" Harry demanded to know why he was the one at fault. "Because seeing this, I would go back, I would stop all of this, I would save the people who didn't deserve to die like this."
"That's good," the person smirked.
"Good, you have shown me my worst nightmares and you say it is good?" Harry exploded in anger.
"It's good because you can go back, it has been twenty-one years since your death, three and seven are magically powerful, together even more so, and we can send you back any of those three numbers worth of years from your death. Of course if you choose twenty-one you won't be born and we're likely going to be right back here, so I'd suggest you don't do that one.
"But if I go seven years back, I'll be starting Hogwarts all over again," Harry hummed.
"Yes, but you will be very weak, and vulnerable. How long until someone figures out you have knowledge of the future and let's say, removes you from the equation?" the person asked. "If Tom discovers this, do you think he'd prioritize the stone over you, when you are that much more dangerous and valuable?"
"Shit, but if I go back 3 years, I'll be just after the tournament ended, I wouldn't be able to save Cedric and Tom will have his body back, but I could get ready," Harry nodded his head.
"I have to pick 3, it's the only option, even if it's not the easiest," Harry stated.
"Did you really think you'd get an easy option?" the person snorted and made Harry roll his eyes. "Don't worry we'll get you sent back right quick."
The person grinned before waving a hand over their face to reveal their identity to him. "Cedric?" Harry said in shock that it had been him the entire time.
"Sorry I had to show you all this, I just really wanted you to be motivated to go back, if you didn't and just went on through then we'd not really have a shot again to fix it all," Cedric apologized.
"No I, I get it," Harry agreed that he needed to be scared, he needed to be pissed off, he had to want nothing more than to go right back to the fight. "I'm just sorry."
"Hey Harry, it's okay, I don't blame you, you did better than I could ever have, just promise me you'll save Cho, from them and from herself, but maybe don't kiss her this time? Also, have some fun, there's no point to all of this if you just end up miserable. This isn't just so you are alive, I want you to live."
"I promise," Harry wiped a tear from his eyes as he felt pretty good being able to talk to Cedric once more. His vision started to go white and the next thing he knew he was waking up.
He was back at the Dursleys.
And he'd never been so motivated before to do what Severus Snape has always accused him of. Become the biggest headache to the entire bloody world.
Author's Notes: I think my only hang up with this starting chapter was if I was able to convey that Ronald killed Harry because he was still somewhat affected by the Locket even though it was destroyed. That the long term exposure to it was not something that just went away one hundred percent after it was destroyed and it was a severe moment of weakness after the final battle that Ron acted, he'd lost a brother, many people were dead, there was just a lot going on and he couldn't resist the residual effects of the horcrux. This wasn't supposed to come off as a Ron was secretly a death eater moment or anything like that but he'd acted without thinking and then never told a soul so people just believed Harry expired after the battle.
Also this won't really be heavy on the bashing, the personalities of all the characters was them at their very worst and Harry will everything he can to prevent that from happening so they don't become those awful versions of themselves.