Chapter Text
Standard Disclaimer: I own nothing in regards to Harry Potter or Final Fantasy 7 Remake. All properties therein are those of their creators. I am only a writer working on my skills with worlds and characters that I love.
Note: As I understand it, there were some narrative changes made between the original game and the remake. I have personally never played the original, so the content contained in this story is from the remake alone.
Note: I played FF7 Remake when it first came out and absolutely loved it, and now with the release of FF7 Rebirth, it seemed the perfect chance to run another playthrough and try my hand at writing something in that world at the same time. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Chapter One - Hello Midgar
“Come out, Potter! I want to see the light leave your eyes when I kill you!” Voldemort shrieked as he launched yet another curse into the headstone that the boy who lived was currently squatting behind.
Now, Harry Potter had started off this little conflict firing off curses of his own, fully intending to put up the best possible fight he could while attempting to take his foe down with him or, failing that, survive long enough to find some route of hightailing it out of there. But five seconds of spell-slinging had shown him how remarkably outclassed he was in the arena of dueling, and with the veritable hoard of death eaters waiting in the wings escape was impossible. He’d nearly been disarmed twice in three seconds; so he’d elected to get behind some cover as soon as possible and work things out from there.
However, things were definitely looking dicey at the moment. Yet even now, he couldn’t really muster the will to be scared. He’d done what was expected of him; he’d tried. But in the end, Harry had been ready for death for a long time now. How could one fear the ultimate end to all of their woes? A release from the hell of his relatives. A stop to all the crazy professors trying to kill him. A chance for a fresh start in a new life, hopefully in a land or plane of existence other than England. Who wouldn’t accept it? Only the knowledge of the sacrifice of his parents had kept him from taking the easy way out several times over in the past. Now though, if he was going to be killed anyway… there was still something he just had to know before accepting the end.
“Why though?” He called into the darkness. And remarkably, the spells stopped impacting his cover.
“Eh?” Voldemort’s incredulous voice sounded out as he started walking carefully around his obstacle. Yes, being barefoot looked good for his followers, an image of their lord paying not a single thought to his traversal of the world around him, but resurrected or not, stepping on rocks hurt like hell. “Is it not normal to wish to see the light leave an adversary’s eyes? Especially when one considers that I have waited thirteen years for this.”
Not realizing that Voldy was getting closer just yet, Harry called back, “Yeah, but why though? That’s the thing I’ve never really understood. Why did you kill my parents? Why did you try to kill me? What the hell is all of this even about?!?!?!?!?”
The dark lord could not believe what he was hearing. How could the boy not know the reason for their fated enmity? How could Dumbledore not have told him? Unless… the old coot had thought the truth would utterly demoralize young Harry. That had to be it. Knowledge of being fated to fight someone as magnificent and powerful as himself would utterly have devastated anyone, let alone the last chance the Champion of the Light had to try to forestall the reign of the Heir of Slytherin.
Well, that could work quite well for him. If he dashed this child’s will now, then it would make it all the easier to deliver the final blow. “Neither can live while the other survives.” He stated simply as the top of what looked like a head of spiky hair finally came into view. Just a little more and he’d have a clear target. “These were the words of a prophecy I was informed of the night of our first encounter. The prophecy was about you and I, and though I did not hear it in its entirety, the lines made sense on their own. We must be the ones to kill each other, so I elected to be done with it sooner rather than later.”
That statement broke Harry out of his semi-suicidal fugue state, and simply from the simple reality of how absurd it was. “You mean you just took it at face value? You do realize that that statement says ‘only’ we can kill each other, right? So what happens if we just don’t?!?!? Damn, I’m only a teenager, but even I know that history is full of stories of people who completely misinterpreted prophecy because they only took one look at what they were told!”
“I am confident in my interpretation of the prophecy, boy.” The Dark Lord began to raise his bone-white wand, dark laughter bubbling up from the back of his throat as ultimate victory finally came into sight.
“But are you certain?” Harry desperately yelled back. “What if what it really means is that as long as ‘neither’ of us kills the other we’re both functionally immortal?!?!?”
At that question Voldemort’s exultantly horrendous dark laughter suddenly stopped short. “I… I hadn’t considered that. What if-”
“I have him, Lord!” Macnair shrieked with triumph. He’d been sneaking around the edge of the tombstones looking for a chance at glory and he’d finally drawn a beed on the hated adversary of the Dark. “Avada Kedavra!”
“No!” Voldemort wasn’t sure he believed the boy’s interpretation of the prophecy, but if immortality, the goal of his entire existence, was truly so close at hand then he needed time to examine the odds fully, not a sudden end to the entire possibility! In a flash of movement trained by decades of battlefield dueling experience the Dark Lord raised his wand and fired off a bludgeoning hex, the closest thing to a solid form projectile the wand could launch and one of the only spells he knew of that could interrupt the arc of the killing curse.
Time slowed as the spells arced towards a direct intersection in front of the boy who lived, and suddenly, to the shocked eyes of those that could follow what happened next, the boy’s wand seemed to rise up under its own power, twisting Harry’s wrist in a foreign and rapid pattern before firing off a red spell at the last second that met the other two at the same time, less than a foot from impacting his own body.
All at once the world went white, howling wind knocked everyone gathered off their feet, and the air filled with the screeching noise of a thousand birds dying at once… and then all was silent. Voldemort was the first to find his feet, and several short strides forward brought him at last to what he expected to be the apparent resting place of his greatest adversary. Instead, there was nothing. Merely a carved out hole in the ground where the boy who lived had once been, the walls of the trench superheated enough to turn the dirt to glass.
No further sign of him was discovered that night. And none more would be forthcoming in the years to come.
Elsewhere
He’d thought the sweet release of death would be an endless oblivion. A dark hole that swallowed him like a cocoon and sheltered the remnants of his being from strife for all time. Instead there was no feeling, and no texture, to the material that seemed to wrap around him and then release. One moment he was in the graveyard fighting for his friends, his life, and the potential future of his entire race, and the next he was simply somewhere else.
Where the passage of a portkey was cool nothingness tinged with sporadic twists as if his body was suddenly corkscrewing through a bendy straw, this new place was an endless drop through a kaleidoscope of horrendous coloration, screeching sound, and experiences that defied all possibility of definition. It was enough to turn a sane person mad… but Harry had never claimed to be well adjusted…
His passage through the hellish portal could have lasted seconds or years, it was impossible to tell, but one moment he was holding on to the scraps of the memories that made him… him, with a grip of iron, and the next he was smashing through what felt like a plate of iron-reinforced glass and everything just… stopped.
With a jolt, Harry realized that the world had gone silent and he could actually name his feelings again. He was cold, uncomfortable, and something rough was digging into his cheek. Slowly reaching up, he felt the texture of the floor and realized he was on a platform of reinforced rebar. The hell?
With a groan that rose from his throat like bile, and stemmed from the feeling of nearly every muscle in his body crying out at once, he forced his torso to sit up and lie back against the wall behind him so he could at last take a thorough look around. As he did, several things became apparent.
First, the platform of rebar was apparently the fire escape of some sort of abandoned building. Second, that building appeared to be in some sort of less well-to-do portion of a town. Third, the town was unlike anything he’d ever seen before, if the people walking around in the street below with swords on their backs and varying degrees of large guns in their hands were anything to go on. Fourth, and perhaps the most important, he was definitely not in England anymore.
In fact, he was pretty sure he wasn’t on Earth anymore either. And how did he come to that conclusion? Did it have to do with the harrowing freefall through what he could only describe as an antimatter portal to hell? Could it be because he’d never seen people dress like the passerby in addition to their weapons? Maybe it was the flashes of clearly arcane light popping off from people doing random tricks; ergo magic existed here and it seemed pretty normal, a far cry from England. Or could it be due to the massive fucking disk that was floating in the sky above his head like the fist of an angry god? Gee, I wonder?
Far from being distraught by the revelation of his new circumstance, Harry found he was just… relieved. Indeed, the cramping muscles that had pained him so after the travel through the warp found some sort of second wind. All he could think about was no longer having to deal with the Dursleys. No longer having to suffer abuse at school. No longer having to pretend to be less than he was; less skilled, less wealthy, less capable. Early on in life he’d learned that standing out from the crowd only ever led to pain and suffering, especially after being revealed as the most famous person in his world. Dumbledore himself had made sure to tell him on more than one occasion that he shouldn’t try so hard, and merely attempt instead to ‘ enjoy his youth ’. To the point that the old man had even tried to chide him for buying new robes at the start of fourth year because they were ‘too ostentatious’ . The prick. They’d just been newly bought off the rack for once.
Yes indeed, Harry had many choice thoughts about his Headmaster, and none of them were pleasant. Over the years he’d become aware of several odd happenings in his life that the old man had seemed far too involved in to be proper or welcomed. Discovering that Dumbledore was the one that left him with the Dursleys (a slip of information gleaned from Hagrid over tea in his second year) had poisoned the well of any positive feeling he’d originally held for the seemingly-genteel warlock.
And, as it happened, that wariness had set him up well for his new circumstances. Hand flying to his throat, Harry released a sigh of relief as the familiar rough texture of the leather cord came into contact with the pads of his fingers. His first year, during the visit to Gringotts, Hagrid had left him alone in his vault to handle some Hogwarts business, and the friendly goblin that had brought him asked if he wanted a bottomless bag for his withdrawal. It had come with a slew of fine features including, but not limited to, an unbreakable cord, limitless depth, and a latent disillusionment charm that hid it from all eyes except for his own. Always on the brink of deciding to run away from his relatives, the orphan loved the idea of having a healthy supply of gold on hand. So he’d drained his vault entirely, and later added all of his coursebooks as well. Foreign world or not, he had a feeling that gold would still be quite valuable.
For about twenty minutes he stayed on that fire escape, letting his body come down from its adrenaline high as he continued to come to terms with his new lot in life. Was he going to miss his friends? Yeah, but that was honestly the only negative to starting over in a new place. At least here anything he got up to would only really be by merit of his own hands and deeds, instead of his fame or the machinations of others. On the whole, there were worse situations to be in.
Once his fingers stopped shaking entirely, he at last rocked back onto his feet, kicked a nearby ladder down, and started climbing into the alley below. A quick-step around the front to the street proper and he finally had an idea of just what kind of structure he’d popped in on.
It was pretty run down, old, and the windows were covered in shutters and wooden two-by-fours, but at one point it looked like it could have been some sort of two story house or storefront. Now, though, it was clearly abandoned and left to rot. A shame really, as just from a cursory look around it was clear that there were a lot of other businesses in the area, so if someone could refit the place it could have been quite profitable.
“Thanks for catching me.” He patted the railing on the deck out front in thanks for softening his arrival and turned out into the street, intent on giving serious effort to investigating his new home…. Which was, of course, when he found himself nearly flattened by a stampede of scared citizens wielding sloshing buckets and screaming ‘Fire !’ at the tops of their lungs.
Now, lost in a strange land he might be, but Harry Potter was still Harry Potter; and that meant whenever there was a crisis at hand where people could end up dying… he of course ended up running right at it before he could stop to think how stupid such an idea really was.
Ducking in line with the others (and thanking his stars that his tournament outfit wasn’t exactly out of place amongst so many others) he ran through street after street until he came to what was clearly some sort of tenement building. The roof was on fire, trails of it dripping down the walls like lava, and smoke was pouring through all of the windows like a chimney sweep’s wet dream.
All around, men and women were throwing buckets of water on every conceivable surface they could while a clearly beleaguered older man in a red hard hat pointed and screamed instructions to any person who would listen.
Judging that to likely be the man in charge, Harry ran over to him and demanded, “What’s the situation?”
The man stared down at him as if he were crazy. “Kid, I ain’t got time for nonsense. Get a bucket, join the line, and-”
“I can do more than throw on water!” Harry quickly drew his wand and cast a lumos spell to drive his point forward.
The elder man let loose what was clearly the first eased breath he’d had in a while. “Well why the hell didn’t you mention you had Materia with you from the start? What can you do?”
“A lot. Where can I be of the most use?”
“Hard to say.” He removed his hard hat and ran a hand through soot and sweat stained hair. “My volunteers are doing what they can but it’s taking everything we have just to keep the fire from spreading. Can your Materia save you from the heat?”
Harry assumed Materia was this world’s term for magic, so he nodded. “Yeah, it can.”
The man gestured to the building’s second, third, and fourth floor. “Everyone is accounted for from the guest registry except for four persons. One on the second floor, right hand side. One on the third, left hand side. Two on the top floor in the attic room. The owner says it’s located toward the center of the structure. If my boys can open a path, can you get them out?”
“Sure, but… you seem awful quick to trust a stranger.”
“You wouldn’t be the first skilled merc to pass through Sector Seven and our emergency services are too shorthanded to care much about age when useful hands are presented. So as of this moment consider yourself inducted into the Sector Seven Volunteer Fire Brigade. Now get to it!”
The apparent Fire Chief barked out a set of orders and soon a trio of men with crowbars smashed in a relatively cooler section of the wall to provide a fresh opening. The moment he saw the last brick crumble, Harry enacted a bubblehead charm around his face, cast three ice-wind hexes at the encroaching flames (thank god for Hermione’s tournament prep training) and charged on in.
Keeping his arm on the right wall to keep from getting turned around in all the smoke, he located the nearest set of stairs and quickly ascended to the second floor. Once there a Point Me charm led him to a closed door at the end of the hall that he promptly banished before rushing into it.
The small apartment was relatively smoke free so it was relatively easy to see the cowering elder woman hiding under the bed. The hall behind him was heating up faster than cooling charms could secure, and that left the window as the only avenue of escape, unless he wanted to take the woman with him as he went higher.
Deciding to stop wasting time, Harry ran over to the bed and reached his arm under for the stranger to take. “Come with me if you want to live!” To her credit, the woman didn’t waste any time before latching onto his arm like a vice and following him over to the nearest window. “Alright,” deciding that quick explanations were best here, he explained, “my Materia can lower your weight, so I’m going to let you out here and I promise you’ll float down like a feather. Do you understand?”
The elderly woman smiled bravely and nodded as he waved his wand in front of her and cast a featherlight charm. Once her body became illuminated in purple light to show the spell had taken effect he helped her out of the window frame, and waited until she started inching to the ground before running back into the hall and repeating his search pattern up to the next floor up.
The second survivor was in a room on the left side of the building and had apparently passed out drunk before the crisis had hit, as he was currently splayed half on his bed and half on the floor when the wizard burst into his apartment. That made things rather easy, as all it took to remove the victim from the hazards around him was a simple levitation charm, a shove out the window, and a repeat of the Featherlight charm to have him following the first victim to safety.
Things took a turn for the worse after that. As Harry ran back into the hall he saw that the passage behind him was not only superheated, but that it was also completely engulfed in flame. He tried a few freezing hexes but the heat and smoke disbursed it all before any meaningful effect could take hold. There just wasn’t enough moisture in the air anymore to make those spells work. It seemed retreating back the way he had come wasn’t a viable strategy.
Well, nothing else for it. He turned on his heel and ran as hard as he could for the next stairwell… which was when something else blew up in the hall behind him, sending shrapnell flying into the space directly ahead of where he was currently charging. Luckily, most of it flew right by and only created subsequent new holes in the wall, but one piece slashed right by the edge of his bubble and popped it clear out of existence.
At once Harry’s face grew taught with heat and his lungs began to burn from the carcinogen-laden oxygen that remained in the building, but the roar of displacing air behind him made it clear that he didn’t have any time to wait to cast another bubble; all the ready fuel behind him had been consumed and the hungry maw of the conflagration was raging towards the closest source of new sustenance, the floor above. If he stopped for even a second the odds of being consumed along with everything else would seriously stack against his favor. What was worse, even if he had the time, casting another bubble would only regulate the conditions he was in at the time. Ergo, he’d still be breathing poison, which was why he’d gone out of his way to cast it outside where the air was still clean.
So, accepting the suck that his situation now was, the wizard hunched his shoulders, ran up the last flight of stairs, and rugby tackled the only door that met him at the top, shattering the wood, and taking in the state of the room now revealed to him as the floor beneath his feet began to shudder and sway, it’s supports clearly already eaten through in the blaze.
A quick glance around and he found the two occupants of the space lying unconscious by their beds. Both were girls, maybe around his age, but through the smoke it was hard to tell, and Harry was pretty sure the wall above one of them was scorched charcoal-black while the other was merely peeling paper from the rapid temperature change. Strange that.
He stumbled down next to them and found their pulses before casting twin featherlight charms, sending a blasting hex at the wall facing the street, and lifting them both under his arms. No way back, only one way forward, and a situation that was bound to be a pain once everything was said and done. He just reallllllyyyyy hoped Hermione’s theories about weight displacement in spells was true.
As the floor began to crack beneath his feet, Harry took off running once more and kicked off the newly-made ledge with the last of his strength and in short order all three of them were tumbling through the air to crash dead into the earth in the alley below… or rather, they would have if the featherlight charm hadn’t slowed their fall easier than a parachute would have.
So it was that they landed in the middle of a group of volunteers throwing buckets on the walls to cool them, and a good thing too, as the moment they did, and he was sure the girls were safe, the rapid onset of adrenaline wore off, paired with rapid smoke inhalation, and as the volunteers finally registered that they were no longer alone, he promptly keeled over, passing out before he ever even realized his consciousness was being robbed from him.