Chapter Text
Easier said than done. Building a new life from scratch was nothing short of maddening complicated – especially without money. He got as far as deciding on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, before it got really complicated. The largest of the Pitcairn isles caught his eye to be specific. It was a really large rock, no inhabitants and uncontrolled vegetation, but the mild climate was nice and if he was forced into the chance of starting a new life he would seize it and make sure he was as anonymous while still comfortable as human wizardly possible.
For weeks he worked on great feats of magic. The island was large enough so he could cast part of it under Fidelius to make a formidable hideout if things ever got awry. Things always got awry for him eventually after all. And with time he even managed to incorporate the large amount of pent up magic in the earth into his work on the wards and soil itself.
He learned that he could channel it through him, using his body as a sort of conductor what was weird in itself. At home magic came from within the wizard, from the core, was limited by its size and was more or less pushed out of the body’s channels with the help of wands as foci. There was some ambient magic where ever great numbers of wizards did magic daily like Hogwarts, Diagon Alley and most of the old pureblood mansions but here it was inside the earth, everywhere in the ground and air. Though strangely enough not in most of the flora or fauna, and obviously not in the humans.
During his search for wizarding societies he had come across of a few minimally magical plants, herbs and small creatures and he had decided to bring them together in hopes of repopulating the planet with them. For that he needed space and the right conditions. So he worked on creating more rich soil, farming fields, sands without any nourishments, woods and he even dug a hole deep enough to create a pond of groundwater and piled all the excess material somewhere else and fused into a small mountain, with caves and everything.
And with the help of a few climate control wards his island bloomed from a barren rock into a multitude of terrains and natural habitats. Because not so deep down he was still only a small boy who spend a lot of time in a cupboard dreaming of places far away from the Dursleys, the southern half of the shore was ground into a fine white sand creating a long beach, nature had provided some colourful coral reefs just a short way off the beach. The other half of the sea line was grown into cliffs with the exception of a small bay where Harry had the forethought to build a small dock and harbour in case he one time did have company who would need to travel by muggle means.
At that thought he added a simple but smooth landing strip on one of the cliffs.
He carefully separated the areas where the magic was concentrated the most and planted his gathered magical herbs and flowers here, he would expand the space as he found more or new ones.
Over the time he had nicked hundreds of trees and bushes from all over the world as he realized he couldn’t transfigure everything an expect it to grow like natural things, so he decided to ‘thin out’ the global population of tress here and there by about one or two plants. Nobody ever missed them.
So he had palm trees for his beach, oaks, birches, beeches, chestnut and so on for his deciduous woodlands and pine trees, spruces and even a few Christmas trees for his coniferous forest. He debated for a while whether he should attempt to get himself one of those huge Sherman Trees or the oldest Chinese Ginkgo but he figured they would be missed as they’d been around from 1500 to 12000 years. Instead he got himself a patch of rainforest under a special weather enchantment and left it at that.
After numerous failed attempts at building even the simplest shack to live in permanently, Harry admitted defeat, dug out his tent from his emergency pack and decided it was time to take up a job so he could get money to buy materials and some knowledge in the form of books on how to build a real house.
He had, of course, thought about nicking what he needed from Gringotts but Galleons wouldn’t get him anywhere as they refused to be melted or scratched and to prove that they were made of gold, chips of it would’ve been needed. And while England had one of the oldest currencies still in use, the solid gold coins of muggle money he found had been long since replaced by cheaper coins and paper money. The coins in his hand were somewhat valuable as there were collectors probably willing to pay for the coins but it wouldn’t last him long, especially since he needed paper work to find a job in any muggle society.
_-_
After Harry had cursed himself blue and blown up quite a lot of his surroundings he tried to calm down. He had just gotten away from the third suspicious collector who insisted on papers identifying his person and the origin of the coins.
“I’ll hex the next one until he takes those bloody coins!” he murmured to himself and disapparated to the next coin shop he had researched. Really, he had done what he could to exude seriousness and trustworthiness. He had painstakingly transfigured a muggle tweet suit and tamed his hair ruthlessly with the help of a modified petrification charm. His scalp was itching and he desperately wanted to scratch it but he’d break his fingers on his hair right now.
Straightening his shoulders he send a silent confundus charm through the window at the owner before he stepped inside and introduced himself confidently
“Good day to you, Mr Herford. My name is Lupin, we corresponded last week about the Guineas I found in my inherited house.” None of that was true but his moral compass was out of commission right now, he needed the money. Money got him the paper work he needed so desperately.
“Ah… yes? Hello, Mr Lupin was it? Oh, um I must’ve forgotten about our appointment.” He looked a little lost “Well, let me see them.”
Harry handed over the sack with almost all of the coins he had scrounged up in the Gringotts lobby and watched as the stout but energetic Mr Herford went about his business of confirming the authenticity of the different gold Guineas in front of him.
Half an hour later, Harry breathed a sigh of relief as he pocketed the few thousand Pounds he had been paid. Now for those blasted papers.
Half a dozen confundus charms, a small obliviate, liberal application of his meagre funds and a tale of a fire of epic proportions later saw Harry Potter leaving the administration office of London with legal papers proclaiming him Harry James Potter, age 21, resident of Number 54 Bedford Street, City of Westminster, London. It was the address of the Leaky Cauldron so nobody would ever be able to find it and he adjusted his age to his looks.
Harry hadn’t exactly stopped aging at 17 but he didn’t look his almost 29 years either, even for wizarding standards. His face and body hadn’t so much aged but more like weathered, his skin had lost the smoothness of youth but not gotten any wrinkles, due to his dark hair, his face had a shadow of beard even though he never grew any facial hair to speak of. He looked a rough maybe rogue young man, the good-natured mischief his eyes had often held in his home world only highlighted this impression.
_-_
In this world, Harry’s eyes looked more like they did when he first left to hunt Voldemort’s Horcruxes and especially after the final battle. There had been a huge backlash of magic as Riddle’s Killing Curse struck its caster and Harry had taken the brunt of it. It had been pain beyond anything he knew and for days he was trapped in a feeling of being ripped apart and knit back together. It reminded him of the end of his first and fifth year, it felt as if a piece of Riddles soul was trying to latch onto his very being and clawing its way through his soul. After four days in what felt like purgatory, Harry had gathered everything that was left of his strength and stubborn survival instincts and mindlessly slammed into the pain, hoping to purge it from his head and body.
Madam Pomphrey had been frantic, St. Mungo’s research team clueless. So when, after 4 days of having to restrain their saviour to keep him from injuring his body further because of his trashing and clawing at his head, said boy broke his bonds, shattered any and all windows, phials and monitoring instruments in a burst of magic only to immediately after fall into coma, for a fortnight, the healers had almost given up on him.
But he woke. As he had always done. After a myriad of test, scans and protests they released him and declared him healthy. He was in perfect physical condition after all, his magic was unsettled but that was easily written off to the exhaustion he had suffered for the last year of hunting and fighting. His mental health needed time but he didn’t report his sleeping habit out of the ordinary nor was he skittish or jumpy. Madam Pomphrey would’ve protested, his ‘ordinary’ sleeping habits rivalled Mad Eye Moody’s but there were so many still injured and with more pronounced symptoms of suffering, she simply missed that part.
Form many weeks after he had woken, Harry was a shadow of his former self. He felt empty, with no purpose in his life, useless. His nightmares had calmed down in violence but turned haunting. He dreamt of broken dolls and puppets, dead crippled serpents, fires, drowning and of his own body fading from his grasp and view. He’d been terrified. That’s why he absolutely couldn’t and wouldn’t wait for Hogwarts to be rebuilt to take his NEWTs, he needed distraction and he needed it immediately. So he went to Charlie first, dragons promised lots of flying and he wanted to take refuge there, but Charlie had told him sorry but there was no vacant job.
Increasingly desperate, he looked for any kind of work to bury his dedication in but Diagon Alley, Hodgsmeade and most of the other magical centres needed rebuilding and while he tried helping there it was pure manual tedious labour and it didn’t occupy his head. Lucky for Harry, Bill had watched his spiral and kept a close eye on him when he had come back home to the Burrow to help after the war. As future head of the Weasley family he knew very well that the debts to Harry for saving Ginny and his father were by no means repaid and would transfer to him eventually.
So every morning he saw Harry more withdrawn and hollow looking, every evening after a full day of work he saw him more defeated, his resolve strengthened to go with the plan that had budded the day Harry had asked Charlie for a job in Romania.
Six weeks after he had been released from the hospital, Harry was approached by Bill and offered an apprentice position as curse breaker and he had jumped at the chance, not looking back. That was the beginning of how he got his butt into this mess. He didn’t regret a thing, only in the darkest moments, when he had lost hope in this new world, he ever wondered ‘what if’.
_-_
His new papers in hands, he had to decide what on earth to take as a job. He settled on a bench in a nearby park and thought about what to do.
With no school reports, every job in a respectable company fell flat. So he’d have to do something on his own.
“Go with your strengths” he grumbled, as soon as he had spotted the ad, he had felt like it was mocking him and he could almost hear Hermione say “I told you so.”
One would think for the Saviour of a society, Master Cursebreaker and languages expert, in addition to being a powerful wizard, it wouldn’t be too hard to find an applicable skill. The languages were the same on this earth after all. Nice and convenient. There are lots of people funding their entire education after school with lending their knowledge on a freelance basis to translate various texts if they can, for example, convert a Chinese manual into an English or Russian one. All fine and well, Harry was required to learn at least three different languages for his Mastery after all, and after he got the hang on it, he even did eight.
Here shows the problem, Harry Potter thought he could beat the system and squirrel his way out of too much work. He specialized in dead languages. It was complicated enough to learn the new alphabet, symbols, grammar and what not, he really didn’t want to add pronunciation and - Merlin forbid – phrases or figures of speech. Hermione told him it would come back to bite him in the bum. It never did in his own world; on the contrary, knowing isolated, dead and extinct languages like Sumerian, Kusunda and Celtic got him a lot of respect and offers for the most interesting tombs. Here, it gave him nothing, even in his world it was a small circle of people who delved that deep into this topic and everyone who popped up with knowledge about it had to fight tooth and nail to gain and hold his reputation.
“It’s a possibility for long term, but I need a bloody job now!” he almost shouted to no one in particular, drawing bewildered looks from passing park goers. His dignity did not allow him to blush but he discreetly removed himself from the park and apparated back to his island. Where he promptly collapsed, having forgotten to take the trip in stages.
He woke, again three days later to the grumbling of his stomach.
“OH, sod it! I’ll have to do something about that.” He slurred and stumbled into his tent.
As he stood in the tent's small kitchenette and threw a hasty meal together absent minded, lamenting how useless he was, he felt like he was kicked in the shin, hard.
“Ow! What the heavens-” well, that was new. He felt like Snape had risen from the dead and was glaring at him for being a dim witted dunderhead in the face of the obvious. Harry squirmed, he felt earth’s magic behind the impression but he was obviously missing something.
Harry contemplated what magic wanted him to notice when his heating charm on the pan flared dangerously and singed his fingers. His jaw dropped.
“Cooking? Are you serious?...No, absolutely NOT! The nerve of you. You make me feel dim witted and propose I COOK?” The magic retreated as his ire rose, fast. Cooking as a service to others was a sensitive subject for him and he would never even remotely consider-
A small vindictive smirk appeared on his face. No, cooking was out of the question, but there were other skills he had been drilled with in that house. Skills he first had to learn but was then ‘relieved’ of having to use them because he had become better than his instructor, much better. Yes, he would try it. It wasn’t something that would earn him money immediately but he was confident it would give him enough satisfaction to pursue this particular skill so that he could accept living in a tent and getting back to a Spartan life for a while.
Just like this, sweet BITs was born. Baked International Treats.
Old pastry and desserts which were once served to kings and emperors - if he could find them also those for pharaohs - forgotten and still served recipes alike.
It took over two years to get him set up. Learning how to till a field, grow his own crops and fruits and research his recipes were his first steps but the more he dug into old cultures and their living, the more he noticed that sugar was a modern invention and not used for most of his recipes, so bees it were. He wanted to grow most of his ingredients on his island, he had magic to help him after all and it would sustain his own life early on too, when his funds were mostly gone.
It took another year for his reputation to spread. An incredibly short time but it helped enormously that a certain Steve Rogers had a sweet tooth, was one of the first customers to respond to an ad Harry had posted in a history magazine, had a metabolism allowing him to sample each treat Harry could come up with multiple times, had one of the individually designed boxes on his person almost wherever he went and was generously and eagerly sharing his not so secret source of his little baked sins.
Unknown to him, Harry’s first regular customers on American soil were almost exclusively S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and their families.