Chapter Text
15th of July 1991
Timeloops suck.
Anyone with half a brain and a will to live would feel the same, as is, Sara loses more brain by the day and with every failed attempt at living.
It starts the moment after she gets the letter, every time.
Sara blinks at the owl, breathing air into aching lungs and wondering if this is hell, if this is punishment, if this is purgatory.
She takes the letter with numb fingers, surrounded by the noise of London’s busy streets as the Owl flaps its wings and leaves, its job done. Hers, unfortunately, is only beginning.
Sara opens the letter as she walks away, stepping around the hurried strides of passerby as she retraces the familiar words. They’re memorized by now, she sees them behind her eyes when she closes them for too long.
HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY
Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore
(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock,
Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards)
Dear Miss Samonte,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.
Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July.
Yours sincerely,
Minerva McGonagall
Deputy Headmistress
It is as unchanging as the wind and the tides, a constant. With every death Sara gets this letter, and with every letter she is sealed into her doom.
You would think it’d be harder to die in a children’s book, and usually it was. She made it all the way to the war the first time, died to avoid being captured by snatchers. Sara had thought it was a fresh start, a lucky retry waking up fake eleven all over again. A boon.
She didn’t live to the war the second time. The third she died in the battle of Hogwarts. This, this would be try number seven. Sara hates that number, hates its meanings and it’s implied significance. Maybe she’d stay alive this time long enough to hit drinking age.
She doubts it, but a girl can hope.
Her feet are walking to Diagon by instinct, an exhausted acceptance laying heavy on Sara’s shoulders like a noose. The killing curse still has her twitching, muscles spasming like they’re remembering how to work properly after being stopped. She will gain no strange scars after this one, the killing curse doesn’t scar unless you’re a chosen one with your mother’s love protecting you, and she’s glad for it.
She has enough scars as is, ones that will not fade with age nor death.
Sara folds her letter four times, tucks it into the left pocket of her jeans, smells the exhaust and hears the chatter around her. She is alive, shaking what shock left from her failures away with every passing second.
It’s a sunny day, the 15th of July 1991 is not a terrible day to keep coming back to, even if she sort of wishes it were raining to match her usually grim mood. It’s 1:07 PM, lunch break for some, and she knows old Tom will be leaned against the bar on the far right, that two old witches will be sitting just to the left of the door in from London and that two families will be standing around looking at their children’s supply lists. The Leaky Cauldron will be less grim now than it was when she was last around to see it.
Sara steps over a cracked tile of pavement and turns, opening an old varnished wooden door that smells like fate and butterbeer.
Don’t ask what fate smells like. It’s not pleasant.
“And you’re certain Old Aggie isn’t pulling your leg?” One of the old women says to Sara’s left, the both of them gossiping. Try three she had just sat in here and listening to the people talk, clutching her thighs and remembering how to breathe past the Cruciatus.
Nothing useful is being said, just old women chatting about the state of the world, workers coming in for lunch and families buying school supplies early.
For now Sara needs money, and she needs a wand. She feels naked without one, even after learning what wandless shit she could she wants one on her, two if she’s at her most paranoid.
She needs her stuff back, needs her stupid fucking school supplies, needs to spend days and days reading tomes on how to make a better fucking rune to carve into her skin to keep from getting hit by another stupid Aveda Kedavra.
There is nothing to stop it, not without related blood willingly given by the truest of hearts intending to protect another. Unfortunately for Sara, she has no mother here, and she won’t be getting handouts like Harry Potter.
So again and again she comes back to herself, eleven and stupid and walking back into a pub and into a world that will not thank her for her efforts.
Sara is stupid, too stubborn to just leave for America like a more well adjusted and self protecting person. She wants to win, even if it means going through stupid fucking first year potions over and over again and jumping between every goddamn Hogwarts house as though it will help her chances for survival.
The glowering “eleven-year-old” steps through the sticky pub and goes out the side door, tapping the correct order of bricks and ignoring whatever wonder she may feel at the undeniably, unforgivably magical alley.
It’s so bright, so fucking cheery compared to the grim gray of the past two years of war. It makes her heart clench. How many times will she be made to watch this place get carved out, its soul plucked and leaving only hollow buildings and scared people?
Sara Samonte scrubs a too soft hand down her face, stepping around robed wizards, witches and otherwise with only half her attention. Gringotts, she needs to get to Gringotts, get her five-hundred year old inheritance, and buy a wand. The rest can be dealt with later.
Will this be a time where she just dumps all her knowledge on Dumbledore? Twice she tried that, twice she died before the war.
It’s not a shining track record for old Dumbles. He’s more good at getting teenagers killed than keeping them alive, admittedly. No matter how hard he tries, he’s old, and he’s fallible.
Sara death-stares her way to the big bank, stepping up the polished white steps to the door and paying no mind to the warning against thieves. What would they do? Stab her? She glances bemusedly at the armored guards at the door, all too aware that she could just. Set them on fire or something.
Elemental magic really is the most basic and easiest to cast without a wand. Wiggle of the fingers and boom, burning trees, burning homework.
She should burn more homework this time, it gets boring being so good at the curriculum you’ve done over and over again.
Sara steps silently inside of the bustling bank, cool marble floors shining and polished, and she walks up to the main teller at the very back of the room, the imposing one you should only be walking up to for important business.
Sara likes to consider her business real important. So she’ll be avoiding any lines, thank you.
“Yes?” The goblin asks, peering down at her. She can see the thoughts running through his head without using a drop of Legilimency. “Blah blah unaccompanied minor blah blah surprise she knows things.” Her life is just repeating the same steps over and over and over again.
“I would like to take a magical blood test,” Sara says blandly. “I believe I am related to a few dead lines with vaults here.”
Luck of the isekai, she is related to a long dead magical house, though she hadn’t thought to check until round three when things were especially grim and desperate in the money department.
Samonte is a Filipino name, and what magic family lies with it is far off in the Philippines, unaffiliated with Gringotts and hidden from view. Samonte wasn’t her last name before this, she only knows it’s hers because of the Hogwarts letter.
That being said, the blood of her body links directly to a squib line with a great number of unfamiliar names, all the way up to an early sixteenth century witch by the name of Elpis Hafner née Ravenclaw. The last Ravenclaw, so far as Gringotts cares to know. She died in 1513, widowed with only one child who was a squib. As per her will, her accounts were only to be given to a wizard or witch of her blood.
A blood supremest asshole who snubbed her kid and who Sara has to thank for a fat Ravenclaw vault that’s accrued five hundred years worth of interest. Lucky her.
“We shall see,” The goblin says, looking down his nose at Sara in a way that isn’t too rude for a goblin. She doesn’t blame the hostility towards humans, humans suck.
Sara feels a little more alive with a wand in her pocket and a coin purse on her hip.
Ollivander stared into her soul, spotted the strangeness and took only three tries to hand her her wand. Her first, and her forever. Phoenix feather, cherry wood, twelve inches, springy. Carved lovingly to have swirls and little flowers all over it.
It’s warm in hand almost like it remembers her, old friends reuniting once again to set off into this mess of a world. She’s probably just being overly sentimental, though.
She goes to Flourish and Blotts next, buys her expected reading for first year, a journal, and a book she hadn’t finished before dying. It’s a highly advanced runes tome with a focus on ancient Sumerian practices, written for actual academics in the field. It probably looks suspicious in her little hands.
She doesn’t care. No one is going to look at a random eleven-year-old too closely, not this deep into peacetimes. The world is still rosy, and Sara has no need to look over her shoulder yet.
She finds a few more books that catch her eyes, one on baking bread a hundred different ways, one on enchanting jewelry, one of those dumb children’s Harry Potter books that profited off of the name of a kid who couldn’t sue for copyright infringement.
Sara lays the books down at the clerk’s wooden counter at the front of the store, already pulling out her coin purse.
“You a muggleborn?” The blue haired girl behind the counter asks, picking up the ancient runes book with dubious airs. She’s got a nose ring and a tattoo of a frog that’s slowly crawling up her hand.
“Depends on who’s asking,” Sara says, pondering Azkaban and snatchers and Voldemort looking at her with too keen red eyes.
The clerk snorts, smiling down at her. “I’m only asking cause your parents aren’t around and you’re wearing muggle clothes. You know the money system?”
Sara has had this conversation around six times already with this teenager. Even if only one of them remembers the exchange.
“Yup,” Sara says, popping the p. An older woman steps up in line behind her with a kid in tow. Samuel Archer, a fourth year Sara thinks. Maybe this year he’s in his third year, actually, she forgets. A Hufflepuff.
“Three galleons and four sickles,” The clerk says, and Sara hands the money over without complaint, the books being magically shoved into a dark canvas bag with Flourish and Blotts stamped on the side with a flick of the clerk’s wand.
“Thank you kindly,” Sara says, sounding far older and tireder than she looks as she grabs the bag and loops it over her shoulder, already heading out the door. She’ll need to get the other required items, but first a trunk. She’ll just buy one from a second hand place and enchant it bigger herself, rather than paying the premium for one from a fancy store.
That is the plus of doing this shit over and over again, you get to pick up some handy skills and reuse them. The first two trunks she bought herself and they cost an arm and a leg to get a little apartment inside. She won’t be making that mistake again.
Sara steps back out into the alley, and walks through the crowd unhurried and with practice. She’ll need to go to a muggle thrift store for clothes, as well as a visit to Madame Malkins even if it increases the risk of meeting an array of other students.
Cedric would be there getting new robes today, as he always was around 3 PM.
Sara grimaces, wondering if there is a chance she can stay alive long enough to keep him saved for a little longer. She could always put her own name in the Goblet of Fire again, that had gone just swell for her last time.
‘Kill the spare,’ was a little more personal now, that’s for fucking sure. She didn’t need extra empathy for Cedric’s plight, nor did she want to get got so fucking early again. Dying after the first year is a pain, there’s so much work to retread.
This time. This time she will succeed. And if she dies before she turns twenty-one she’ll fuck off to somewhere sunnier than Britain and live well for awhile away from Hogwarts, let Harry Potter try and fix the mess on his own.
Sara gets her vacation either way, that’s what matters. And gods be fucking good, she needs a vacation.
Sara walks onwards, picking out a dusty old trunk from a second hand store from one of the alleys that shoots off the side of Diagon, then, because Sara is weak, she avoids Madame Malkins in favor of getting her potions ingredients and cauldron.
“Capacious extremis,” Sara intones, flicking her wand as if tracing a box, then stabbing through the middle onto the trunk. The tip of her wand glows faintly purple, flickering and pulsing with every sweep.
She repeats the spell three times, because repeating things like this the right amount of times only makes the charm work better. Then with a huff she opens the trunk, satisfied to see it’s the size of a small room in there. When she needs more space she’ll add it, but first she’ll need to transfigure some things into a bed, bookshelves, the works.
“Facile capto,” Sara says, swirling her wand then tapping the trunk. That would make sure she didn't have to worry about jumping in to grab things, the objects will just pop into her hand.
Her final spell creates a false compartment, one that makes it look like a normal sized trunk rather than a weird fucked up one.
Sara stares at the trunk for a long moment, feeling the warmth of her wand in hand and feeling a little empty.
With a great big sigh, Sara flops backwards onto the bed she’s on.
“Indomitable she, the one who keeps running into a wall over and over again instead of finding a ladder,” Sara says wryly to herself, looking up at the cracked off white ceiling. Her voice is so unbearably young, her body weak and squishy, and her mind too old for this shit.
Cumulatively she must be around forty, right? She doesn’t feel forty. She doesn’t feel quite young either. Seven years, four years, six years, seven ye—
A knock comes from her door.
Sara’s green eyes narrow, snapping to the door.
That is not normal.
Did she do something out of the ordinary? Take too long at a store? Knock into someone by accident?
Sara slides off the bed, the old quilt on top of it scrunching with a quiet shhhhh. She stands and walks with the purpose of a predator, wand tucked away in the pocket of her robes right next to her twitching fingers.
Sara opens the door, and is face to face with—
Well. Face to robed chest.
“Sara Samonte.” A shiver rolls down from her neck to her spine, something cold and light like a breath.
Sara looks up and is, unfortunately, greeted by the pale boned grin of death.
Hm. Shit.
“I would offer you a cuppa but you can see I’m lacking in a kitchen at the moment,” Sara says, slowly blinking at the skeleton man and wondering if the liquid would just. Dribble through his ribs. Their ribs? It’s weird to ascribe gender to abstract concepts.
“Someone such as I can rarely be afforded hospitality anyways,” Death replies, lifting it’s teeth up and down in a mime of speaking.
They stand there for a moment, the quiet buzz of the bar below floating up the stairs down the hall. Sara traces it’s dark dark robes, notes the way they glimmer and the pale porous bones they drape over.
“Suppose it’s best to invite you in, I imagine we’re closer to old friends than strangers,” Sara says finally, peering out the door and looking both ways down the hallway, spotting an old man looking at her funny leaned on the wall by the stairs. It seems no one can see Death but her.
Hallucination or strange magical happenstance?
Sara moves out of the way to let Death through the entrance, and shuts the door behind it. Regardless of the answer it’s best not to be seen talking to yourself in public.
Death makes no sound as it walks, stopping to stand in the middle of the room and moving its head around as if looking at the surroundings.
“Humble, familiar beginnings,” Death says, almost contemplative. Its voice sounds masculine, low and with just a hint of a more posh accent. Can death be posh? Death comes for everyone, regardless of birth or class.
“Better than a park bench,” Sara says, smiling uneasily, with sharp eyes. It’s a paltry effort towards friendliness.
“Yes,” Death says, unbothered and unsurprised. Death turns and faces her, and she faces it.
“Will you explain why this whole mess has been happening to me?” Sara asks, feeling the scars from her deaths ache like it’s raining. “Or did I accidentally touch all three of the hallows last time?”
She has never touched the elder wand, not once, not in any life. Dumbles watched the thing like a hawk and when it was in Voldy's hands? Impossible. She is no Master of Death, not in the literal titled way. Maybe mastering death in a “I can’t fucking stay dead” way also counts.
“You are closer to the truth than you think,” Death says. “I have come to warn you.”
Sara’s eyes narrow. There is a staleness in the air, and a chill growing in it, not quite as cold as death, but edging there. The silence in the room is loud and she can hear blood pumping in her ears.
“Warning me of what?”
“Your soul glides past my fingers, just out of reach with every last breath,” Death says calmly, as though speaking on the weather. “But I must collect one day. You come here after your seventh death, and so I may appear to you. You will not escape my reach forever.”
Sara laughs, then, a wry tired thing. “You think I’m doing this intentionally?”
Death tilts it’s head.
“You once held a different name, whispered into the wind you did not wish to die, not yet. And the wind answered. It has answered you here all the same. Do you think it is something else, holding you here?”
Seventh death.
She’s only died six times as Sara Samonte.
Ah.
Sara pulls out a chair at the desk shoved into the corner, sitting heavily.
“So you understand,” Death says.
“So I understand,” Sara repeats.
Why keep herself alive? After all this time, every failure, why does she want to live?
“It is human to fight me,” Death says, Sara not looking over to meet those pits in its skull where eyes should be. “Perhaps the most human thing of all.”
“You must rest one day, though. It is not so horrible to walk that path,” Death intones, and there is a cold skeletal hand lying on Sara’s shoulder.
Not yet.
She wants to see this thing through, to see this world saved from the big bad and herself lounging in a sun chair by the beach.
“I will prolong the inevitable, for a little while. You’ll have me in the end,” Sara says, and when she looks up, she is alone.
“What is it like?” Dumbledore asked, what feels like a thousand years ago in the quiet of his office.
“To die?” Sara intoned, fiddling with the wrapper of a lemon drop, the candy sour and sweet on her tongue.
“To repeat.”
Sara took another lemon drop.
“The world holds multitudes, and not all of it can be learned and seen in one lifetime,” Sara said. She was in the middle of doing her best at mastering potions at the time, would start herbology afterwards. “It is strange to watch everyone grow up again and again.”
Dumbledore looked at her like she held multitudes, like the world and like potions. Sara did not and does not. She ’s more of a lemon drop.
The good thing about having done this so many times is not much can surprise Sara.
The first time was hard, hard dealing with what is real, what she misremembered from books and fanfiction and movies, how to survive in the summers without a home and without any ties to the world.
Sara has stepped through 9¾ at Kings Cross so many times she can feel the cold barrier sinking into her skin when she thinks of it, hear that whistle of the train and the hum of conversation and magic in the air.
So, on September 1st 1991 Sara is very unsurprised when she almost runs into a Weasley twin walking onto the platform, she is even less surprised when he, Fred she thinks, says “Blimey that was close!” with a too wide grin.
Sara mumbles an apology, disappearing into the crowd before his mother can think about catching another grim green eyed orphan to show the platform. Harry can take that honor all on his own, thank you. Sara is way too old for mothering.
Well, not to say she doesn’t appreciate the care, she just dislikes the assumption of incompetence that comes with people thinking you’re a child. Sara knows it's a necessary evil, but she avoids too much contact with adults who aren’t Professors for a reason.
It’s a problem every time she fucking tries the Order of the Phoenix, even when she pretends to be a seer. Molly, bless her heart, will always kick up a fuss to shield her from the battle. Sara can’t begrudge her for it. Sara would do the same in her position.
As is though, Sara’s been in this war far longer than Molly. And she would much rather not have to skulk around to get important intel.
Sara drags her trunk up into the train, peering into compartments and pondering where is best to put herself. She thinks she knows where a few of her year mates will end up sitting. The train is full of noise, kids and teens filling the air with conversation, footsteps and little shows of magic. A taste of what they couldn’t have over the summer.
Some of that strain on Sara’s shoulders fades, back in her element. First year? Piece of cake. Second year too. It’s when falsely accused convicts and dementors start appearing that things get weird. The big angry snake doesn’t even kill anyone! Most of the time.
She’s got this, she just has to deal with eleven-year-olds. She will forever be dealing with and surrounded by fucking eleven-year-olds.
Sara turns and opens the door to her right, sliding it to the side without seeing the occupants. She’s decided to let fate decide where she sits today.
She blinks slowly, much like a cat when displeased. Draco Malfoy stares back.
Speaking of annoying eleven-year-olds.
“You got room in here?” Sara asks, already walking in and shoving her trunk up into the carry on area. Goyle is already sitting beside Malfoy, so she assumes Crabbe isn’t here yet. The three stooges will be off in search of Harry Potter for the first half of the ride so she’s sure she’ll have enough reading time.
“Wait! I didn’t even answer!” Draco says indignantly, and Sara tries not to snort.
“There’s obviously room, I was just being polite,” Sara responds, opening her trunk for a moment to tug out her book on runes and her journal before shutting it with a loud thump.
“That wasn’t polite at all,” Draco says. Sara sits down beside the window.
“Politeness is subjective,” Sara says, opening her book at her bookmark. She’s in the middle of learning about arrays, the sort that rely on geometric shapes and sunlight and blood. This book is too broad for her tastes, and it doesn’t go into enough detail about the practical parts of creating the example runes given, just explaining what scholars think they do and what the writing means.
On top of that the runes are skewed towards flood and drought protection, since most of what remains of Sumerian style runes and can be recovered by scholars are long buried in riverbeds.
It’s useful anyways, if only because she’ll be sure to have her crops protected in case Voldy calls in another great flood. She supposes she needs to get crops first though. Maybe a petunia in a little pot counts as crops, one she can keep in her windowsill in the summer.
“Where did you even get that book? I don’t recognize you, are you a halfblood?” Baby Malfoy is asking her questions. How novel.
“It’s impolite to ask people their personal business before introducing yourself,” Sara says contemplatively, like a hypocrite. “And I got it from a bookstore, you can find it in Flourish and Blotts if you want a copy.” There were four copies with a slowly growing layer of dust barely kept at bay by the bookshelf’s charms against grime. If he decides he does want one in fifty years they’ll probably still be sitting there.
Sara will always like younger Draco better, before he grows and turns meaner in a way he can back up with a wand. Eleven-year-old Draco is a boy leaving home for the first time, certain he’s going to be the prince of Slytherin and prancing like a peacock.
Seventeen-year-old Draco has a Dark Lord over his shoulder making him make examples of people like Sara, gaunt and trembling like a leaf.
…for now he is a stupid kid. One staring at her with wide blue eyes and silly slicked back hair.
“I am Draco Malfoy,” Draco says, tone implying she should know that already. “You are certainly not a pureblood if you ask silly questions like that.”
If Sara were petty, she would bring up having the literal Ravenclaw bank vault key. That sort of name would send Lucius Malfoy’s head spinning, and every silly pureblood of any importance would know about it within a week if she were willing to give proof.
Sara isn’t petty. She’s old and tired. She played that game before and it didn’t do much good for anyone.
“Blood has got nothing to do with magic,” Sara says grimly. One day he’ll realize it, and it will be a horrible day. For now though the blonde boy huffs and puffs.
“Get out of my compartment! We were here first, right Gregory?” Draco says, turning to his friend for help.
“Yeah,” Goyle says, dark eyes flicking between Draco and Sara. No doubt he’s been taught to not hit girls already, so he’s probably considering whether or not he’s supposed to bodily remove her.
“You can’t own a train compartment,” Sara says, and then takes pity on the boy. “I’m Sara Samonte.”
Draco opens his mouth to say more, but is interrupted by another kid opening the compartment door.
It’s baby Crabbe. Funny, she last saw him a few weeks ago covered in soot and trying to set Fenrir on fire. Draco turned coat at some point during the battle, Sara thinks, and Crabbe and Goyle had followed suit. Well, Crabbe had. Goyle died. Maybe that’s what had Draco turn coat?
Well, he’s not dead now. Good for him! And woe for Sara.
“Vincent! Help me tell this girl to leave,” Draco says petulantly.
Vincent Crabbe looks between Draco and Sara, then at Goyle, who sort of shrugs half a shoulder.
Vincent simply drags his trunk in and puts it beside Sara’s, since the other side is full, and sits down heavily beside her.
“Crabbe!” Draco says, face turning a splotchy red color that's probably part embarrassment and part anger.
“Did you know Harry Potter is on this train?” Sara says as the train’s horn blares. They’ll be taking off in probably five minutes. “You should find him, I hear he needs friends.”
By the time the train is moving out of the station, Sara is free of eleven-year-olds for now. She could’ve put herself in another compartment, but most of her options were upper years who didn’t want a first year near them, and other first years. Most first years are about as annoying as Draco, Sara will be honest.
In the very least she would have a little time to herself to write notes. Would it be bad of her to try and get into the NEWT level runes class again? She’d probably have to explain all her knowledge to old Dumbles and come up with a convincing backstory for herself.
That was always the hard part, making something up that explained her never getting Christmas presents or having a guardian in sight at Diagon, but didn’t make people try and take her nonexistent guardians to court for neglect. Or forcefully try and adopt her and feed her too much. Like Molly. Mostly Molly.
Sara’s go to is to say her father works in America, and that really does make it hard to send letters most of the time, don’t worry insert head of house here.
Sara doesn’t really care about presents anymore, to be honest. It just makes her feel worse when she has to leave everything behind.
The door slides open again thirty minutes later, revealing a pissy Draco Malfoy and Co. once again.
“Harry Potter apparently doesn’t want my sort of friendship,” Draco says snidely, sitting down in his seat in a careless slump, arms crossed.
Maybe Sara will avoid joining Slytherin this time. Her nostalgia for a Draco who is less capable of murder will probably run out by the end of the train ride.