Work Text:
When Harry first decided to leave his life behind for a shot at averting the war, he’d known there were a lot of people he would miss. Luna, Neville, all of the Weasleys. Teddy. And, of course, Ron and Hermione. Pulling on the timeturner chain without them was like hacking off a part of his soul. And Harry would know.
He misses them, still. Of course he does. But it’s in the way he misses indoor plumbing and hot showers – something to sigh over for a moment on a cold winter night before getting on with it and shambling to the outhouse.
No, the person Harry misses, would do anything to speak to now, is Voldemort.
He wants to know what it was like for Voldemort, in the first war. Wants to know when exactly he gave up on being Tom, who the first people were to start calling him my lord. Wants to hear him cackle on about all his vile curses and grand plans. Most of all, he wants to know if there was ever a moment when he looked around and wondered how the hell did it get this far?
Because maybe that’s just a Dark Lord thing. A phase they all go through. Or maybe Harry is just a giant fuck up.
He really has no clue how it got this far.
It was supposed to be simple. Not easy, not without cost, but at least straightforward. Pop back to the 1920s, find Tom Riddle, and either punt him off Big Ben (Ron’s idea) or guide him onto a better path (Hermione’s). And then live out the rest of his life. If he was careful, and played his cards right, he’d even get to see everyone he loved be born before he died, a peaceful death in a peaceful England.
That was the plan. And then he crash-landed in the middle of the British Dark Ages instead.
*
The first time Harry Potter kills someone, it’s an accident.
It’s dark, and there’s shouting, and nothing looks the way it’s supposed to for London in the 1920s. There are people, torch light flickering across faces and glinting on metal, and they’re yelling words that sound like things he should understand but refuse to add up to actual language. He’s disoriented and terrified and when his stunner goes wide it takes down a tree branch.
The man it falls on screams until his lungs fill with blood. And Harry learns to live with that.
The second time Harry kills someone, it’s self-defense. Not an accident – the motion meant violence, and violence is what it wrought. But it wasn’t a choice, really. The man is coming at him fast, coming for the bread Harry had rightfully stolen, and Harry moves.
It’s not magic. Magic is dangerous in this time, for reasons Harry hasn’t quite figured out yet. He hasn’t found the wizarding areas, and the muggles here, they’re not like his muggles. Not going to breeze by the unexplained, cock their heads to the side and then shrug it off or never pause to wonder in the first place. No, these muggles notice. Their eyes track the flash of a spell, zero in on any strangeness. And then they turn violent. So Harry learns. Harry carries a knife.
*
For a long time, that’s it. Surviving.
Neither can live while the other survives…
He didn’t understand the difference, before. Between living and surviving. He finds it in the rubbish heaps of Ludenburh, in the slack space in his skin where his meager fat reserves used to be.
The language isn’t right. The landscape isn’t right. The god damn sky isn’t right, filled with more stars than Harry has ever seen, even at the top of the Astronomy tower on a moonless night. He has no idea of the year, no energy to count the passing days. He barely knows how to put on his own trousers in this time, much less make a life.
But he can stay alive. He’s good at that. And, eventually, he learns, just because he’s been around long enough and is still breathing.
*
The third time Harry kills, it’s preemptive self-defense. Which is functionally just self-defense.
Objectively, he should walk away. The child isn’t his. He’s nothing to him. And Harry has more than enough trouble trying to keep himself alive and moving.
But he sees it. Sees the way the water twitches up into the air, spinning for a moment in a whirlpool over the trough. Sees the blinding, excited joy in the child’s eyes. Sees the way that joy gutters in an instant, the way he finches before the man standing with him even raises his hand.
Sees another child, wan and green-eyed. And he can’t unsee it.
It’s easy enough, once he draws his wand. A stinging hex, a jellylegs jinx. The stuff of pranks and childhood and the man is puddled on the ground. The child stares at him with wide eyes so full of wonder he doesn’t even cry when Harry grabs him, walks away.
It’s easy, but it’s about to get very hard. Because the man saw his face. Saw his magic. And maybe he won’t come after them, but he’s sure to run his mouth at every tavern he can stager into.
There’s another thought, held tight against Harry’s bones. A question his mind won’t allow but that his body already knows the answer to. What will he do to the next magical he meets, when I’m not there?
Harry already knows where to put the knife, the way his mind makes the skin more resistant than it actually is before the blade shoves through, the surprising lack of resistance in the interior, the way it feels a lot like cooking. Knows the spell to get the blood spatter off his clothes, and the kid's. There was nowhere to leave him.
The kid was going to learn anyway, eventually. This is a world of Dursleys and they’re armed with worse than frying pans.
“What’s you name?” he says to the child over the fire that night, once he’s apparated them several towns away.
“C-Cassian,” he whispers. His eyes are fixed on the fire, gleaming orange in the dark, and Harry thinks maybe it’s good he landed centuries away from where he’d intended. If this is how he handles kids, the world is probably better without him getting his hands on a young Tom Riddle.
“Hello, Cassian. I’m Harry Potter,” he says, and sticks out a hand. The kid – Cassian – ignores it, but turns those flat eyes on him.
“Haw Po,” he lisps, stumbling over the new words. Harry doesn’t try to guess how old he is. He doesn’t want to know.
“Close enough.”
*
The reason he hasn’t found the magical community yet is that there isn’t one.
There’s magic. He’s sure of it. The dratted child standing next to him is proof of it.
But there’s no castle. There’s no town. There’s nothing but grey-washed sheep grazing on a meaningless scrap of Scottish moor.
No Hogwarts.
Nowhere to leave the kid.
Because that’s why he’d apparated here, finally. He’s suspected what he would find, wasn’t willing to risk the truth in the rushing wind and forlorn bleats (can sheep be forlorn? Or is he projecting?). But he’d thought, mused, hoped that they might take Cassian off his hands.
It’s not fair. It’s not right. He took the kid from his home, and he should be the one responsible for him. But the child is just so flat, it’s like babysitting a ghost. He never speaks unless spoken to, never asks questions, hardly moves unless Harry is there to direct him.
And Harry can’t raise a child. He’s hardly keeping himself alive, much less rearing a properly functioning human being.
But there’s no Hogwarts, no Hogsmeade, not even a hint of a magical community in Godric’s Hollow or Fen or Ottery St Catchpole or Mould-on-the-Wold. There’s nowhere to leave him.
“We’re going to apparate again, okay Cassian?” Harry says, because the kid might not react to literally anything, but Harry will be damned if he leaves him in the dark about what’s happening to him. Even on something as small as this.
“Okay, Hawpo,” he says, letting Harry thread his fingers through his.
It’s that night, tucked in a shanty up the coast, that Harry makes his decision. He gave and gave and gave during the war. Gave his time, his childhood, his safety, his life. And then he gave up everything he had again, a life that could have been beautiful, for nothing. He’s been here for years now, and he’s done nothing, changed nothing, met no one. All he has to show for it is a ghostly child he didn’t even want.
He wants it back. He deserves it all back.
It’s not hard, in the end. Or maybe it was. Maybe he started making it the night he landed here, the night he spent half-buried in moss, bending his fingernails back painfully in the dirt to try and ignore a man’s gurgling death rattle. That, that was hard, and every step away from it was hard.
But this is the end, in some ways, and this is easy. Transfigure an ember into a ring – and if it looks like the Peverell ring, well, Harry never claimed he wasn’t sentimental. Scratch out the runes he’d spent long hours staring at over Hermione’s shoulder in what he was sure then would be the worst year of his life. Coax out the torn fragment of his soul, rent by Cassian’s father, or uncle, or whatever he was to him – Cassian’s yet to say, and Harry’s never asked.
And then it’s done, and he slides the ring onto his finger. A Horcrux for a Horcrux.
Harry laughs and laughs
*
The fourth time Harry kills, it’s because that’s what you do. He stops counting.
*
It turns out having the child around isn’t so bad. It takes years for him to gain some life behind those eyes, but Harry’s in no rush. He has all the time in the world, after all.
“But I want to understand how it works,” Cass says, glaring up at the ball of light slowly circling his head. “Your lights are always steady, and they change brightness without you saying anything. If I understood the mechanics I should be able to get mine to do that.”
“Ravenclaw,” Harry mutters.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he says, and plucks the wand from the boy’s fingertips. “It’s not about your knowledge, or your skill. You’re casting with another wizard’s wand. The spells will never be as good.” He twitches the holly lazily and the dishes on the table rattle, smudges of supper vanishing.
Cass’s fingers twitch, but he doesn’t reach to follow the wand. He’s livened up, yes, but he’s still careful. “When can I have my own wand, then?” he asks instead.
“When you find where to get one.” Ollivanders is in business, Harry knows, but given there’s no Diagon Alley he hasn’t the foggiest idea where they’ve set up shop.
“Where did you get yours, Herpo?” Cass asks, the childhood nickname long since mutated into something unremarkable and familiar.
“From a place long gone in the distant mists of time,” Harry says, voice bone dry. “Now go check the fire.”
*
In the end, Cass gets his wand in the time-honored way of all wizards. It chooses him.
It happens when they’re in a town outside of Ludenburh, further south than they’ve been in years. One moment they’re plowing their way through a swampy street and the next Cass is gone, disappeared under a pile of black ringlets.
The wand is in Harry’s hand without conscious thought, the tip barely protruding past his index finger. A silencing charm to keep from drawing attention, then a vicious stinging hex, the movements flowing into one another with practiced ease.
“Honestly, Thora, what do you think is going to happen?” a voice hisses, and Harry spins to face it, a confringo on his lips.
But it’s not a muggle with a ready knife or blow, or even the bone white wand a part of his mind will always be braced for. Instead, there’s a middle-aged woman glaring out from the doorway, arms folded tightly across her chest. She’s not even glaring at him, but at the riot of curls currently blotting out Cass.
The projectile steps back, resolving itself into a girl not much older than Cassian. Her mouth moves, but no sound comes out, and she shakes her head instead, keeping her silvery eyes pinned on Cass.
“Be that as it may, there’s no reason to cause a scene,” the woman says like the girl has spoken. “Get inside. All of you,” she glances at Harry for the first time, waving him in.
He should turn around and leave. He’s just cast magic in front of this stranger, and that’s a sure path to blood and mayhem. But she doesn’t seem the slightest bit perturbed by the fact that her girl’s gone mute – in fact, that might be amusement playing in the crow lines of her eyes.
In the end his body betrays him, and curiosity is moving him through the door before he decides to go.
“Well,” the woman says, closing the door firmly behind the children and plunging the room into the hovel-darkness Harry’s slowly grown accustomed to. “I’m Bess Ollivander, and that’s my daughter Thora. Feel free to keep the spell on as long as you like. Does my ears good not to have to listen to her.”
This town is nowhere near a river, which is strange because suddenly rushing water is all Harry can hear. It takes several beats for him to realize it’s the sound of his own blood in his ears.
“Did you say Ollivander? The wandmakers?”
“That’s the one,” Bess says, entirely casual.
Harry might have lost it then, fallen down a blackhole of memory he couldn’t get out of, but Cass at least seems to still be functioning.
“Wandmakers, you say? I’m Cassian, and that’s Herpo.”
Harry turns to the child, half a mind to correct him, but then he’s staring into the gleaming silver eyes of the young girl. It’s like staring across time. Though these eyes would probably be less creepy if he hadn’t seen them before, centuries in the future.
With a start he remembers why she’s silent and drops the spell.
“It sensed him. It wants him,” she says immediately, voice almost vicious in its excitement.
“Wants who?” Cass asks at the same time Harry says, “What wants him?”
“My wand- The wand. My first wand.” The girl is bouncing now, hair bobbing a beat behind. “I’ve been keeping such a close eye on in, and when you walked by it lit up. You’re it! I knew it was meant for someone.”
“You don’t know that yet, Thora,” Bess cuts in. “Let the boy try it out.”
“The boy…” Cass mutters to himself, then goes ridged. “Do you mean me?”
“Yes, dummy!” Thora all but shrieks, grabbing his hand and dragging him towards the room’s single horn window. The feeble light seeping through illuminates a small side table and, almost fading into the shadows, an ebony stick slowly rolling back and forth across the surface.
“Well, pick it up,” she says, shoving Cass’s hand toward it when he fails to move. Cass’s fingers slip through hers numbly, lying slack on the table. He casts a look back at Harry, searching, but Harry doesn’t move, doesn’t nod. For once in his life the child has to move on his own.
When he does, Harry is almost surprised. His fingers skim along the dark wood, nearly touching, then jolting away when they finally rest on the handle.
“It’s warm,” he says, voice a cracked squeak.
“Of course it’s warm,” Thora drawls. “It likes you. Pick it up and give it a swish.”
Properly cowed, Cass follows her orders, drawing the wand up with trembling fingers and flicking it in a slow, meaningless arc, a flurry of snowflakes falling in its wake.
“Herpo, was it?” Bess says later, handing him a cup of ale while Thora regales Cass with exhaustive detail about tapering angle and wood grains.
Harry hums his assent, taking a sip of the drink. He doesn’t bother to correct her. Cass is the only one who calls him anything, and he calls him Herpo, so Herpo he is. (It’ll be many years until he remembers Bins’ droning voice saying that name. Remembers what it means.)
“Might I see your wand? I do take an interest,” she says, eyes sliding over the sleeve of Harry’s tunic hungrily.
“No.” Maybe once he would’ve been worried about seeming rude, or seeming like he has something to hide. Now, though, no feels like a complete answer.
Bess, for her part, doesn’t seem at all thrown by the refusal, sliding off to the next conversation topic. “You seemed surprised to meet us,” she says, and her tone of voice doesn’t even hint at a question. Harry hears it anyway.
“Yes, I was. I haven’t met any other magicals.” The lie comes easily. “Not since I found Cass.”
That, finally, seems to throw Bess.
“Really? None?” A nod. “Where are you two from?”
“Around,” is all Harry offers, but Bess nods like that means anything.
“We don’t keep in touch with many other families, mind, it’s not safe. But most everyone comes through here eventually. It’s the way of it.”
“I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get him a wand,” Harry says. “I’ve had mine for as long as I can remember. Wouldn’t have known where to find another.”
“You get here when you need to,” Bess says. “You know, you might consider staying for a bit. Maybe meet a few people. It looks like you have a lot of knowledge to share.” She turns a significant look at Cass.
He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with Thora, the two children’s knees pressed together. Above them a single ball of light circles, glowing steadily and just dim enough that it doesn’t shine back out through the window.
*
In retrospect, maybe that’s when things started heading off the rails. Because for the first time in years Harry is…not happy, but at the least not miserable. The daily stew is still bland and disappointing, but he can taste it again. He hadn’t even noticed he’d stopped.
Life is quiet in the wandmaker’s house. It’s not all that different from their life before, really, most hours in the day spent keeping warm and clothed and fed. But the garden grows a little faster, a little lusher than it should by rights, and the bread always bakes in record time, and it’s always a little cozier in the house than Harry could ever make their various hovels and lean-tos over the years. He suspects years and years, maybe generations of wards and object charms.
In the time left over from chores, it’s the low, steady thumping of the adze on wand wood and the thrum of magic as Bess strings out wand cores for preservation. And, in the evenings, it’s lessons and spell craft.
It’s shocking, really, to see how little even Bess can do with a wand. It’s not just that many of the spells Harry takes for granted – accio, lumos maximas, seemingly the entirety of transfiguration – haven’t been invented yet. Even when he shares the wand movements, carefully coaxes them through pronunciation, the spells still sputter with all the power of a Hogwarts second year. It turns out a thousand years of advancing wandcraft makes a difference, and his holly wand is an electric bulb to their guttering candles.
Still, it’s nice, watching the way Thora’s eyes go wide when he transfigures the cool morning coals into hummingbirds. Wiping stew off Cass’s face in a way that feels like caring. Burying his scent-numb nose deep into his mattress and inhaling the faint impression of last year’s sweet hay.
And then, like everything else, it’s gone.
“Mama! Mama!”
“Herpo!”
The kids fall over each other into the kitchen, all wild eyes and hair. They’re children, loud sounds and melodramatics are what they do. Still, Harry can’t help the adrenaline that spikes through his chest, the sudden tension in his fingers.
“Manners, Thora! Really, who raised you,” Bess says, not looking up from the silver strands she’s braiding.
“But, Mama, they’re coming!” Thora lunges across the kitchen, and the fragile unicorn tails snap.
“They’ll be here in a minute.” Cass is still by the door. Instead of Thora’s frantic motions, he seems to coil in on himself with tension.
“Who’ll be here?”
“The muggl-“
“I didn’t mean to!”
“People saw. They know and they’re coming.”
“I think they have torches. I don’t know, we just ran. I really didn’t-“
“It shouldn’t have mattered. It wasn’t supposed to go like that.”
“STOP,” Bess shouts, and even this close to hysteria the children snap to attention, Thora reeling back towards Cass. “Now, calmly, what happened?”
Thora, for once, can’t seem to find the words. Finally, Cass speaks. “We were messing around at the market. Just little things. But Thora tried her hand at transfiguring a cat. Just as a joke, see. But it worked, and people saw.”
“They’re coming.”
After that, time ticks by in seconds. Tools and wands swaddled in clothes or shoved into satchels. Vials of feathers and sinew and web clinking in purses. The entirety of the medicine chest shoved into Harry’s pockets, the memory of Ron’s twisted face as he breathed through the pain of splinching suddenly vivid in a way it hasn’t been in years. There is shouting in the streets, pounding at the door, but it’s distant to the driving need to move move move.
They’re in the kitchen again, gripping onto each other with white knuckles, when the first curls of smoke seep around the door. And then they’re folding through nowhere to anywhere but here.
*
It’s love, in the end, that pushes him into it. Not love for a specific person. All the people here still feel too unreal for that, will always feel distant by centuries no matter how long Harry rubs shoulders with them. But Harry loves magic, and magicals, and the world their how-ever-many-great grandchildren will populate. His first and only home.
Voldemort saw love as a weakness, hissed the word with such distain. And maybe it would’ve been, for him. But it’s Harry’s strength. His love is a tripwire in the dark, and when it’s triggered it becomes a wild, dangerous thing.
Absolute power should be hard to obtain. It should take years of study, of sacrifice, of care. It doesn’t. For Harry, power is as easy as reaching out and taking. He doesn’t bother wondering why anymore.
He takes like this.
He shows up on Bess’s cousins’ doorstep in a wave of magic, his anger crackling around them like lightening. It’s simple enough for him to step through space with his people and their possessions, a year taking his turn apparating Hermione and Ron about making it second nature. But side-along hasn’t been invented yet, and it’s a display of power that brings them to their knees.
It’s simple enough to take control. Bess is cracking apart, salt and pepper curls spilling from under her hood like the smoke that’s even now eating her life. The others aren’t used to Harry, to his easy leadership or the magic that seems to cover him like ivy over old stone. He squares his shoulders, steps forward, tells them how to calm Bess, where to take the children, how to handle the tools. They fall in line.
They’re settled quickly, the wand shop resurrected in the barn and the children asleep in the hay above. Harry should be asleep too. But he can’t settle. He won’t.
They could stay here. Start over. It would be easy enough, to simply keep putting one foot in front of the other. Survive. But they shouldn’t have to.
Bess’s cottage was the one decent place he’s been in the years he’s been here. The first decent place in the entire pig stye of a time. And now it’s ash, because a couple of people saw something they didn’t understand. Or, more accurately, because they weren’t prepared to fight and had to run.
He won’t let that happen again. Next time, he’ll be ready.
He takes like this.
He speaks. He is no one, a tagalong vagabond refugee. But they’re all living with the way Bess’s hands shake over the cooking, or until her ale pools across the table, only going still when they’re shaping a wand. They see the way Thora won’t touch her wand, left in the dirt of the front stoop for days like so much dead wood. They’ve watched neighbors burn. He speaks, and they listen.
He apparates them to a nameless lake on the Scottish moors, and they pull stones from the earth with magic and hope. Hope for a place of safety, a place where their children can conjure flowers in the streets. They offer him their nightmares, their dreams, their desperate prophecies, and he takes them all. Funnels them back into their town’s rising walls.
He takes like this.
He smiles. He laughs. He asks about children, and sisters, and sick relatives. He wanders the streets and he gets to know them, these faces that will wither and die and fade away a hundred times until he’s standing in the world he left, the one he hopes he’s building. He tracks every freckled face, every white-blonde head of hair. He gives and gives, and they don’t even notice how much control he’s taking.
Some of the late comers do, of course. His first band of believers are like toads in a pot, not noticing as the heat rises higher and higher. But magical people keep coming, and they ask why they should follow him, so young and so strange. The first time he’s asked, he conjures light bright enough to blind that fills the room. The second, he throws a crucio. No one asks a third.
And when the muggles come, he’s ready.
*
There might be screaming. There was when this started, but he’d tuned it out hours ago and now he’s not sure if he can trust the ringing silence in his ears.
It should be silent. He’s pretty sure there’s no one left. The mud of the street is red in a way the ground here isn’t naturally, and he would probably be disgusted if he hadn’t spent so much of the last few years walking through streets full of cow and pig and human shit.
The men who came to, as they put it, send the freaks packing are already rotting on the walls back home. But preemptive self-defense is self-defense, so Harry came to burn out the nest.
There are bodies, of course. They’re the source of all the blood. It hasn’t rained this week, but the red dirt squelches under his boots when he moves.
There’s a boy lying maybe five paces away. He’s young, younger even than Harry looks. He knows he’s one of his own kills because the body’s latticed with the tell-tale marks of sectumsempra. He’s never taught that spell to his people, feels a strange, cloying possessiveness over the hissing syllables.
Harry stands in the empty street, stares at the boy, and tries to feel.
The boy has brown hair and eyes that could be grey as they go glassy. There was a time a death like this haunted him, up at night for weeks, screaming for the death he couldn’t prevent. For the boy he didn’t even kill, just couldn’t save. The slashes are familiar, and maybe if he looks hard enough, looks long enough, the hair is light enough to be blonde, maybe he’ll feel that swooping guilt of a bloody Hogwarts bathroom. Of knowing he’s gone too far.
The face stays stubbornly a stranger. His ghosts don’t exist yet.
Cass is waiting at the village edge with the other volunteers. He casts the spell to clear the blood and viscera off Harry’s tunic. Cass’s hands are already clean.
“We’ll be safe now, Herpo,” he says, and the voice is soft enough not to disrupt the stillness. Not yet. “Let’s go home?”
Home. They haven’t named it yet. Harry says there’s no point, it’s the only magical village in the isles so there’s no need to distinguish. Really, he’s leaving the honors for four magicals in the 990s. But their village stands on the place that, someday, is going to be home.
“Yes. Home.”
*
One lesson isn’t enough, of course. The muggles are so sure this land is theirs. As if there isn’t magic thrumming in the bedrock. So Harry keeps teaching.
He struggles with avada. This war – and it is a war, Harry isn’t so far from his memories to forget what a war smells like – isn’t about hate. He doesn’t despise the man ducking for cover behind his peddler cart, the woman screaming over a body in the street. But their hate makes them a danger, so they have to die.
Unfortunately, that means his kills are messy – often painful and always bloody.
The girl in front of him is unlucky. She’s screaming until the acid eats through her ribcage, is still twitching when he turns away.
“Monster,” a man screams, signaling his position before hurling himself at Harry. It’s child’s play to step out of the way, a bombarda ripping into the man’s back. A spell designed for blasting through doors and walls makes short work of flesh, a few chunks of shrapnel sinew and bone hitting Harry in the splash back.
“Your Majesty!” a voice shrieks across the battlefield – and when had that become something he responded to – and Harry is whirling again, slipping his way through the volleys of arrows and spells to the source of the scream.
One of his people – Dunstan, maybe – is crouched low in a side alley, the blood on his cheeks pink where it’s diluting in tear tracks.
“Your Majesty, I, I can’t stop the bleeding,” he says, gesturing helplessly at the shadow below him. “I don’t know what to do.”
Harry knows the girl in the dirt. Of course he does. Gwenllian, though Merlin knows he’s nearly called her Bellatrix every time they’ve spoken. She’s got the heavy-lidded eyes, the haughty cheekbones, the insanity of hair.
She looks nothing like Bellatrix now. He can’t imagine Bella’s face twisted into such obvious pain, eyes wide with pure terror. Not that the terror is misplaced. The girl’s insides are outside, the putrid stink of a belly wound filling the alley.
“I’m dying, aren’t I?” Her voice is faint under the shouts of battle.
The man – his name might be Deacon if Harry thinks about it – makes reassuring noises, but that’s all they are. Even if Harry closes the wound, she’s lost too much blood and there’s no blood replenishing potion to fix it. She’s dying and they all know it.
This girl, this potential lynchpin to the Blacks, gone. Sirius, Tonks, Draco, Teddy, all bleeding out in front of him. And that won’t do. That won’t do at all.
So, Harry does what is necessary. There is a body cooling at the mouth of the alley, blood still seeping from the half-severed arm. All that blood right there, not needed. Would be a shame to let it go to waste.
It probably won’t work. Hermione would be spitting like a cat, reeling off things he only half-remembers from his time in the muggle world, something about blood types and diseases. And then there’s the magical concerns, blood rites and malediction. But it’s the only idea Harry has, so he summons the body, draws blood from the wound and feeds it into the closing cut. Gwenllian passes out when he presses her intestines in, and he has no idea if she’ll wake up. He can only shove a port key at Duncan, then spring back into the fray. Dead or alive, he brings everyone home.
*
His people are angry.
They’re angry because Gwenllian died gasping in her bed, a week after he fouled her body with blood magic. She has four younger siblings.
They’re angry because the baker in Forteviot, who’d been kind to magicals in the past, didn’t listen to warnings to clear out before Harry hit. Like it was his fault he couldn’t recognize a muggle he never met. The seamstress in Perth and that grandmother the month before are besides the point.
They’re angry because that bastard Finlay needs to learn to keep his hands to himself and off women who aren’t interested, and losing an eye makes a lasting impression.
Mostly, they’re angry because when this started they had to swallow the pill of taking orders from a jumped-up kid who didn’t know his place, and now nearly a decade’s gone by and they’re still taking orders from the same fresh-faced twenty-something. He hasn’t aged a day. They may be magicals, but they’re still medieval peasants, and the strangeness doesn’t sit right.
“Unnatural,” they whisper where they think he can’t hear.
“Twisted.”
“Foul.”
Harry ignores it, like he’s always ignored all gossip before. Public perception is a flighty thing (fame is a fickle friend, Harry), and it will turn back in time. It always does.
But then there’s a literal knife in his back, and he can’t ignore it anymore.
It happens at dinner, in the rough and tumble of the great hall. A man is leaning over Harry to pour him another pint, and Harry isn’t watching his other hand. Harry doesn’t feel anything, doesn’t even notice anything is wrong, until Cass turns to him from his usual place at Harry’s right with a look of absolute shock.
“Merlin, Herpo, there’s-“
“A knife in my shoulder. Yes. I can feel it.” His voice sounds cold. Detached. Which is strange, given that the numbness is evaporating and there’s suddenly a fucking wildfire raging in his left shoulder. It seems to fan higher with every breath. “Pull it out, okay?”
“No, we need a Healer. Gabriel!” Cass yells into the suddenly hushed hall and moves to stand, but Harry’s right hand is still seeker-fast, grabs his robes and drags him back into his seat.
“I said, pull it out,” he says, the pain making the words sharp. He just wants this over with. Wants it out so he can heal and maybe go roll in the snow outside to forget the memories of this damn fire.
“Herpo, I don’t want to hurt you,” Cass starts, but then deflates, like Harry knew he would. He moves slowly, carefully as he steps to Harry’s back and settles a grip on the knife, and then all at once to jerk it out.
Harry can feel the muscles resettling in the metal’s absence, restitching themselves where needed. It went deep, judging by the ache in his chest, and there’s some sort of liquid pushing out of the wound and sliding down his back, viscous and sticky.
The sound Cass makes, staring at the neat, well-healed scar under the tip of the knife, is priceless. It echoes loud in the silent hall.
And then Harry makes a mistake. He laughs.
The whispers grow louder.
*
It’s another year and three more assassination attempts before people seem to get the message. They’ve made their bed with a dark lord, and dark lords don’t die easy.
He probably could’ve headed them off. Done more to root out the instigators. But, to be honest, he wasn’t taking them very seriously. The occasional burst of pain was almost worth it for the look of abject horror on the would-be-assassin’s face.
Then he wakes one night to find Cassian slipping his ring off his finger, and it’s not amusing anymore.
He could’ve stopped the boy, then and there. He should have. But he’s honestly just too jarred by the whole thing, so thrown that this boy – this man who he’s practically raised would betray his only weakness. Cass wasn’t the children he should’ve had with Ginny, could never hold a candle to Teddy, but Cass didn’t know that.
Cass. Cassian. The closest thing he’s had to a constant in this time. The person he took the first steps down this crusade for. The boy he taught to conjure light and flower petals and to eat his supper without splattering everywhere.
Then again, Cassian only knew about the Horcrux because Harry had forgotten he was in the room when he was making it. So maybe he wasn’t exactly the best father figure.
There’s an ache in his center, an empty, inarticulable longing pulling at every edge. It drags at his movements, his thoughts, nearly refuses to let him out of bed. He might call this feeling grief, or regret, if it didn’t feel so much like waking up for the first time with his scar empty.
A part of him is missing. He wants it back. He wants to pry it from Cass’s death-stiff hands.
It’s not just Cassian, of course. It’s whoever talked him into it – the child didn’t grow a spine on his own – and every person who’s had a go at him, and every person who looked away and didn’t turn them in. It’s this whole fucking town, this settlement of vicious, hopeful traitors.
Harry’s been reasonable. So very reasonable. He’s over a thousand years from home, surrounded by people older than the oldest ghosts he’s ever met. There is just no way to get a mind around that. The world is slipping away constantly, has been so very far away for years now. Like there’s a very thick, somehow transparent fog between him and everything else. Like he’s staring at a perfect replica of what should be there, somehow exactly the same and not right at all.
And the people. If they were real (they are, they are, he always reminds himself) they’d be horrid. They’re slow and hateful and don’t know what a germ is for god sakes. Harry isn’t brilliant, he knows that, but if he doesn’t have a stimulating conversation with someone in the next century he might kill himself on principle. If he let himself, he imagines he’d feel about them a bit like he did about Wormtail. And isn’t that a chilling thought – an entire planet populated by Wormtails.
But he hasn’t let it get to him. He’s stayed reasonable. He doesn’t kill his followers, doesn’t kill at random, never allows the mistreatment of prisoners (doesn’t take prisoners at all, as a matter of fact). He’s humane, all things considered.
But if it’s a monster they want, then Harry can provide.
*
If anyone ever dares ask, Harry will tell them it took years of trial and error, of careful experimentation. But he already knows how to breed a basilisk. Has always known, since he was twelve and clutching his best friend’s frozen hand. In retrospect it seems a bit silly he didn’t make one sooner.
She’s absolutely beautiful when she hatches, all vibrant, glowing emerald, and for the first time since he showed up in this cursed shithole of an era Harry feels like the ground under his feet is steady and like the air touching his face is actually there.
She eats the toad immediately, chases it with the remains of the egg, each movement as graceful as it is deadly.
Hello, little one, he hisses, and his parseltongue isn’t even a little rusty. Like no time has passed. I’m Harry.
Harry, she returns, getting it right on the first try. And this feels real, this feels right.
May I call you Gemma? It means jewel.
Gemma just hisses in response, clearly uninterested in such human nonsense. Baby-soft scales scrap across Harry’s skin as she coils up his arm until a cold tongue can press inquisitively into his ear. That seems like enough for a yes.
It will be some time yet before she grows into her deadly gaze, but within the week she’s twelve feet long and hungry and that will do just fine. Bloody has become a bit of a signature, after all.
*
Pulling down your home, stone by stone, can be quite cathartic. He gets it, a little bit, how Voldemort could attack Hogwarts in the end.
But this isn’t the end. It’s perhaps a beginning, but probably a middle. Just another thing that happens. On the list of dark lord tropes Harry is trying to avoid, melodrama is near the top. Along with not eradicating the entire magical population, which is why most people make it out, hollow eyed but alive. Gemma grabs a few snacks, of course. She’s a growing girl.
He leaves their house for last, the one that sits where the great front doors will someday. Cassian is in his room, the ring out on the table before him, looking as pristine as it had the day it was transfigured. The table around it is not so lucky, the marks of knives, spell fire, and deep burns a testament to a job well attempted.
“Cassian,” Harry sighs, putting every ounce of disappointment he can muster into that word. It is, admittedly, not a lot. Disappointment is a high-investment emotion.
“Herpo, I-“ he starts, shooting up from the chair, but then seems to run out of things to say. Harry waits, but nothing more comes out.
“Did you know, Cassian, that over a thousand years from now, they’ll call me Herpo the Foul?” His little gem is making her way slowly across the floor, pausing occasionally to taste the air. He knows she’s drinking in the fear sweat rolling off Cassian. “That’s a lot of pressure, you know. I’m worried I haven’t been anywhere near foul enough.”
A shiver wracks the child’s body – and he’s a child again, any trace of the man he’s grown into in recent years falling away – and he slumps where he stands. Never one to fight, but not one to run away either. What a strange thing for Harry to have raised. He wonders, faintly, what kind of person Thora grew into, or if she’s also still just a child wearing a mask. He hadn’t cared enough to keep track.
“Don’t feel too bad. You couldn’t have destroyed it anyway,” Harry says, gesturing at the mess of a desk. “The only ways to kill a Horcrux hadn’t been invented yet.”
One such invention reaches him then, and there’s no point of saying anything more.
Gemma leaves the skull and half a torso. Staring at the white gristle of Cass’s ribcage, Harry wonders faintly if these bones were still in Hogwarts’ foundation somewhere when he walked in, eleven years old and wide eyed. The thought might be comforting. Connections forward always are.
*
When he leaves it, his home is perfect. A smoldering heap of rubble and broken wards. It will cool over the centuries, and by the time four enterprising magicals happen upon it, it will be a marked site of magical power, ancient and intriguing with nary a muggle for miles around.
In the meantime, well. Now is a time for living. He has a companion twined around his neck, a ring on his finger, and all time. If he’s careful and a little bit lucky, he’ll still have his mind and body by the time the 1990s roll around. Maybe finally get the chat with Voldemort he’s been longing for.
And, if nothing else, in a thousand years there will be a chocolate frog card for Herpo the Foul right alongside the card for Harry Potter. And that counts as accomplishing something with this time travel lark.