Chapter Text
There were a lot of different things the kids at Wool’s whispered to each other about the first time another child was hurt by him. About how he had been biding his time, or how he’d always been a freak, or how he had simply wanted to hurt someone because they had hurt him.
The truth was that Harry hadn’t meant it.
Because when rocks pelted him and Harry sat shivering on the ground – always so passive and withdrawn – wondering what he had done to deserve this, strands and wisps coiled out of him uncontrollably and flailed out at a boy who had just been about to kick him in the chest. His name was Mark, Harry knew (someone Harry had wanted to befriend, once), who had been the one leading the attack on Harry. Mark had tripped (was wrenched forward) and fell backward onto the ground headfirst.
What should he have done, Harry wondered, when Mrs. Cole pulled him aside later and softly questioned him about Mark’s mysterious concussion? The other children said that you caused the incident, she informed him.
For the first time in their lives, they hadn’t lied about that.
Should he have told the matronage that he felt she was too passive? That she cared too much yet too little for the children of the orphanage? That Harry really couldn’t bear the sparkle of fear in her eyes when she looked at him, and that he wanted to beg her to see him like she did everyone else? That he wished he could have what the orphanage promised all the children except him – a family?
Should he have told her it was just an accident? Should he apologize like he always did, head bowed and hands clasped, murmuring in an almost frenzied tone – I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry?
Hadn’t he apologized enough? For his actions, for his non-actions, for his manners, for his presence?
(Sometimes for his existence?)
Harry simply looked her in the eyes and spun a lie, woven of silk laced with the growing venom that thinned his ability to care when no one else seemed to reciprocate the feeling. “I think that Mark just tripped when we were playing tag, Mrs. Cole. I didn’t do anything to him.”
It made him feel a little better when he felt the slightly tightening grip of Mrs. Cole’s hand on his shoulder, the wrinkle of hardness around her eyes she didn’t hide, or the smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. He knew that she didn’t believe him.
She never had. She never would.
*
The other children at Wool’s avoided him more often than not now, but Harry could hear their pointed whines and accusations to Mrs. Cole. Harry made our food disappear! Harry was the one that made the mess on the table! Harry was the one who broke Sally’s things! Not that any of them ever had any proof of their claims.
Just two weeks ago, he’d fallen forward and felt an insurmountable amount of pressure on his arm as he crashed down the last few steps of stairs. It was a miracle, the healer later murmured to Mrs. Cole when they thought he was soundly asleep, that his arm had healed as quickly as it had.
Harry knew that the other kids had probably been celebrating when he was gone, their joy replaced by sullen silence when he suddenly returned to breakfast. He knew that Mrs. Cole was as disturbed as ever about this new oddness despite her comforting words toward him.
Harry also knew that he hadn’t tripped on the stairs. He’d felt a shift in force on his back just before he fell down the steps, and he knew exactly who had done it.
Harry killed Jane’s cat, was the rumor for the next few days. The small tabby cat that was cared for more than him had been left with the girl when she’d been brought to the orphanage, and Mrs. Cole had never quite been able to drive it away. It was lying in pieces near the flowerbed in flakes of white shards, its collar lying uncannily on top of its remains. The freak turned it into bones.
Harry ignored Jane’s cries and brought a spoon to his lips as he ate his breakfast, then washed the dishes, then locked himself in his room with the children’s books he had memorized ten times over already. I didn’t, he thought quietly, lacking a conviction he once carried. I swear that I didn’t do anything.
(Later, Harry lit a candle as he heard Mrs. Cole’s footsteps fade away and the noises of the night returned to the equilibrium of silence.
He sat alone in his small room with a scratchy and thin blanket that enveloped him and provided warmth to the best of its limited ability. Slowly, he unclutched the fragile, dead butterfly he’d found lying among the flowerbed outside Wool’s, right after he’d flung the attacking feline away from him in a fit of rage and it had fallen apart.
He pondered about what he had done and why he had done it. How many times could his – freakishness – act toward someone else and Harry continue claiming it as an accident?
The butterfly blackened and cracked into rough particles of cinder into his hands. From the open window, the cool gale that caressed Harry’s skin swept the ashes gently into the darkness.
And Harry wished that things would change.)
*
“Surely, my boy, you have been able to do…strange things, have you not?”
Harry shook his head again, just like the other two times the strange man in front of him who had introduced himself as Professor Dumbledore had inquired. He’d seen Mrs. Cole take him up to his room, knew the rumors she had whispered in his ear, and suspected he was here to take him away. Just like the other children had whispered about before. “I really haven’t, sir. I haven’t done anything like what you’re talking about.”
The man with eccentric robes and a beard that was beginning to taint white leaned back as if waiting for him to confess the truth. So he thought that Harry was lying as well. Not that he had expected anything different.
Then the man reached out his hand and shattered his expectations, and suddenly the chair he’d been sitting in started floating. He couldn’t control the yelp of surprise that escaped his lips as it hovered for a few seconds, then drifted slowly down again. “You – what was that?”
“That was magic, my boy.” There was a twinkle in the man’s eyes as he reached out to hand Harry the fancy-looking envelope he had been holding in his hand. Harry almost snatched it over as puzzle pieces began slotting together seamlessly in his head. Magic, he breathed.
“You are a Wizard, Mr. Alder.” As Harry scanned the letter inside the envelope almost feverishly, Dumbledore continued talking, gaze fixed on the orphan in front of him. “The strange things you’ve been able to do – that is the result of the magic that you hold. All magical children in Britain, when they turn eleven, are invited to go to a magical school called Hogwarts.”
“So there are other people, then, that are like me?” Harry, who had finished reading the letter, looked up in genuine excitement. Dumbledore paused as if he was not expecting that to be the question that Harry asked.
“Of course. In fact, the entire Wizarding World is filled with witches and wizards of all kinds.”
“That’s amazing.” Harry rose out of his chair. “When do I get to go?”
Dumbledore blinked and there was a crease on his forehead as he contemplated the question. “My apologies, but Hogwarts doesn’t start until September.”
“I know that!” He had just finished reading the letter. Fractured light spilled in from the large window that had always seemed so out of place in Harry’s room. “I meant could I go and…live in the Wizarding World right now?”
“Why would you want to do that, my boy?”
Because I hate every memorized nook and cranny of this place, and I hate every reverberation that has ever sounded from the whispers of the other children in this place, and I hate the wasted time I spent in this place, shedding tears and wishing things were different and I was with people who were like me.
“Because I don’t like it here,” Harry said earnestly. “And I have magic, right?”
“My boy.” Dumbledore reached over and rested a gentle hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry thought that his grip was slightly too tight, and the crinkles around his eyes as he smiled a little less sincerely than he had before were too hard. “Why would you say you wish not to live in the muggle world anymore?”
The muggle world. “Shouldn’t I be with…people that are like me?”
“Muggles do not contain magic, Harry, but that does not mean we are not able to coexist with them.”
Harry didn’t quite believe his words, judging from the clarified experiences he’d had with the other – muggle – children. “I know that, but they don’t have magic! They don’t understand – and a lot of them don’t like it. Can’t I live with people who do have what I have?”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible. I’ve heard, Harry, that you have acted in ways that have harmed others at this establishment before?”
There was the accusation that he had been expecting. “But, sir, they were accidents. And they were the ones who acted out first!”
“Just because it is easier to act, Mr. Alder, does not mean that it is right. It is true that wizards raised in the muggle often find themselves engaging in bouts of accidental magic, but is it true that you have always done so accidentally?”
Harry’s breath hitched as he met those twinkling eyes. “Yes, it is.”
Dumbledore went silent for much longer than he had before. “At Hogwarts, we do not tolerate lying to the professors, Mr. Alder, nor do we tolerate any kind of harm toward other students. Please do your best to keep that in mind.”
“…Of course, sir.”
With a small nod of his head, Dumbledore reached out and patted Harry’s shoulder again, benevolent and caring (and so fake). Given orphan funds for his school supplies – since Harry had no money to spare for them – Harry insisted that he go and buy them on his own.
So perhaps Dumbledore didn’t think he was a real Wizard yet, but Harry was used to other people feeling similarly about him. The difference was that now, Harry had something to cling to. There was a world with other people like him, and he was going to prove to Dumbledore that he belonged there.
*
A euphonious voice that reminded Harry of sweet, golden honey pulled Harry out of his new absent-minded habit of stroking his Holly and Phoenix-feather wand. “You’re not a mudblood, are you?”
“Obviously he’s one.” Another student with his dark hair drawn back into a ponytail rolled his eyes. “Tolerance, they say. It just seems to me like you’re turning into a mudblood lover, ‘Braxas. What would dear mummy say?”
Someone nearby snickered.
“I like to check before I make assumptions,” the boy said magnanimously, though that honeyed voice held a strand of sourness. “If you forgot, we are going to be sharing a dorm with him.”
Harry blinked slowly as attention turned back to him. The platinum blonde who spoken to him narrowed his silver, wispy, and stratified-cirrus eyes.
There was no way for him to talk his way out of this, not when the other Slytherins were clearly using Wizard vernacular. “What’s a…mudblood?”
The boy, a first-year Slytherin like him, recoiled visibly. A few others were eyeing him with similar distaste. Harry felt something cold and hard settle in his chest, and he gripped his hand tighter around his wand as the boy spoke again. “You are. I can’t believe I have to share a dorm with a mudblood.”
“I say that the hat’s gone barmy.” The boy with the ponytail rolled his eyes.
“It was made by Gryffindor. What’d you expect of it, Titus? To be reasonable?”
“It is still an ancient artifact.”
Harry identified the emotion radiating around him immediately as conversation started around him again, all diametrically opposed to his existence. It was tactless hate. What the Sorting Hat had said to him about the students in Slytherin was clearly not true, he immediately determined. He would find no allies – no friends – here.
And when Harry snuck a glance over to the teacher’s table, he only felt that heavy feeling in his chest grow when he saw Dumbledore’s expression. It could have frozen over the entire sea.
*
Slytherin ostracized him for being a muggleborn, or muggle-raised, as Harry had learned the insult referred to. When he heard the deprecatory statements whispered just loud enough for him to overhear, he deliberately faced the other direction. When he found his schoolwork calculatedly sabotaged, he simply re-did his work and kept an extra copy of it on his person. When he found the few supplies he had left by his bed rummaged through, he forced himself to swallow the anger down and learned how to use wards.
The other Houses ostracized him for being a Slytherin. The Gryffindors were more obvious about their dislike, grouping up and insulting the first-years behind their backs, including the obvious pariah of a muggleborn. The Hufflepuffs were polite, but they held a sort of unconscious suspicion about them toward the Slytherins as they drew protectively closer to their own. The Ravenclaws maintained a distant coolness and observed him through the lens of a neutrality they couldn’t be bothered to break.
Don’t stick out, Harry told himself through the venom sinking slowly into his consciousness. It will be worth it.
And Dumbledore hadn’t spoken to him once since he’d stepped foot into the green-and-silver house. Harry did notice him, sometimes, quietly observing him from the teacher’s table as if waiting for something.
But Harry Alder was simply another average muggleborn to step into Hogwarts. He remained so perfectly standard and so perfectly integrated into the Magical world.
He was starting to wonder if there was any real point in doing so.
*
Harry stepped back into Wool’s and barged angrily back to his room. No one had moved in while he was gone. No one came to welcome him back. Not even Mrs. Cole. (He wouldn’t have done so either, he knew. It still hurt).
We can make no exceptions, Mr. Alder, Dumbledore had said. As I have informed you before, you have no choice but to return to the orphanage.
And the weak-willed Dippet had agreed to him without a second thought. Harry turned his eyes back onto the ceiling as he lay on his bed and tossed his belongings, the same amount as they had when he first arrived at Hogwarts, to the side. There was a small fissure in the ceiling, he knew, in the top right-hand corner that sometimes leaked water when it rained.
Hogwarts was different. It was large and lonely just like Wool’s, yes, but he belonged there with its endless corridors and moving paintings and interesting classes and abundant library. What did he have here, except for the growing patterns of the cracking walls that he could sketch from memory?
Dumbledore was like Mrs. Cole. The other children at Hogwarts were just like the muggle children at Wool’s. None of them would change, no matter what Harry did to change himself.
Did he want this?
No. Harry did not want to mold himself to please those who clearly would never be pleased with him anymore.
Wasn’t it true that he had always been different than the other children at Wool’s, and it had turned out he was a Wizard? There really had been no point in trying to stay unseen when it turned out it had always been a clue he was meant for something more. Perhaps the hat hadn’t been wrong, then, placing him in the house where everyone seemed to be vying for an advantage to be something greater than their housemates.
Harry opened his charmed bag and found the books he had snuck out from the library. The library couldn’t track him if he hadn’t actually borrowed them, could he?
Harry would set his own advantage and level the playing field. It was time for him to start reviewing the content for next year and perhaps the year after that. Against those who had been born and raised in the Wizarding World, he knew he had a lot to catch up on.
He had the power to change things, now, just as he had always wished before. Why should he sit back like he always had?
*
Second year started out no different. Harry spent the majority of his free time outside in the courtyard practicing his magic, or in the library, pursuing the next magical spell he was determined to master.
Then, he’d taken the opportunity to study the books of the forbidden section of the library after a beguiling Horace Slughorn, who Harry had spun to practically adore him. He was senile and old and much too naïve, despite his rather ingenious brewing and numerous held connections. He ate Harry’s story up – the sudden understanding of magic, the sudden improvements in all his classes, the struggle the poor orphan boy had gone through just to do so. How the boy he had ignored the first year of school had so effortlessly surpassed his pureblood peers, earning their unyielding ire.
Even among the other teachers, Harry went from perfectly average to a prodigy. A gem, hidden under a thin layer of grime and dirt; perfect, in its form and luster, after its faces have been carefully faceted and polished. A perfect example of what it meant to surpass all expectations, he became a favorite student of almost all of his teachers as he met and shattered all their presuppositions.
All except the Transfiguration professor, of course. Dumbledore had even pulled him aside one day, firmly warning him that he was not allowed to practice magic at the orphanage. Harry had smiled at him and the hidden compliment and told him that he had never done so. It hadn’t even been a lie, but the professor sent him away with a weary look in his eyes anyway.
(He simply traveled to Diagon Alley and spent most of the time practicing there.)
“Don’t go looking where you’re not supposed to now, Mr. Alder,” Slughorn had said with a smile, amused and fond at the tendencies of the knowledge-ravenous student. “Good luck with your research.”
Harry had smiled back, only amused, as he took the signed permission slip. “Thank you very much, sir.”
It was in the Forbidden Section where he had struck gold and learned a truth about himself midway through the school year. It was true that he belonged in the Wizarding World.
The Secret History of Bloodline Gifts, a book banned in 1919. Harry ran his hand along the leather-bound cover, opened it gingerly, and re-read the line that had ensnared his attention like light catching a prism and scattering the wavelengths that made up its true being.
Necromancy, he read, every word in the paragraph retained in his memory to a flawless degree, is a bloodline magic that is held among those of Ancient and Noble Houses. There are many stigmas surrounding its existence, which involves a Vixen thinning the line between life and death, and sometimes holding the ability to completely alter this natural order of existence. Basic definitions of the branches of Necromancy include: the acceleration of death (see pg. 25); the inhibition of death (see pg. 54); the temporary manipulation of death (see pg. 93); and the reversal of death (see pg. 139). Primarily among the Houses, the Peverells were known to have held these powers…
*
Claudius Avery was shuffling his feet by the door. Harry, who was the only one in the dorm room, subtly shifted his hand to the wand lying right by his side on his bed. “What do you want?” Harry asked, not very kindly.
The boy gave Harry what could only be considered a shrewd look. “I saw what you did in the library, Alder.”
“Reading, then?” Harry shrugged condescendingly, sparing no more patience for his Housemates. “It’s what one would expect another student to do in the library, Avery, hardly something to become agitated about.”
Avery’s eyebrow twitched in an almost comical manner. “I meant when you almost dropped that book.”
“So?”
“You used wandless and wordless magic.”
So someone had finally caught on. Avery had a rather capricious personality, fluctuating between moods of violence, exuberance, and rumination. Harry wondered how the pureblood heir would react to his next words. “And? I’ve done that for a while now. If the idiots masquerading as snakes in my House haven’t seen that by now, I have no reason to assume that it’s anything special for a dumb little mudblood.”
Avery’s nostrils flared and his lips tightened at the echoed vestiges of words that had been tossed carelessly around the dorm room. He stayed still for a moment with an almost constipated look on his face before he walked to his bed and sat down quietly.
“You managed to complete the demonstration in Dumbledore’s class immediately,” he said unexpectedly after Harry had thought the conversation was finished. “My matchbox did nothing but fold and grow a few feathers. Why?”
“You’re asking the resident mudblood?”
“Yes.”
Harry frowned as he observed the boy. Had he been so impressed by his abilities he was actually going to swallow his pride in order to try and pick Harry’s newfound powers apart?
Two could play at that game.
“Very well.” Something that was not quite a smile broke out on his face. “Why don’t you demonstrate the problem to me?”
A few minutes later, Avery could manage transfiguring a matchbox into a pigeon, despite the fact that the class had spent a week preparing inanimate to animate transfiguration. Avery had been disbelieving, and Harry found out he was well-equipped in his ability to teach others.
Harry would have the epiphany, years later, that this was the moment he gained his very first follower.
*
“You were the one that turned her into a walking blueberry.”
Harry slowly pushed Ignatius Prewett’s hand away and readjusted his robes. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know I saw that look of satisfaction, Alder.”
“How very interesting for you.”
Prewett continued to press him. “Macmillan was the one that ruined your potion, wasn’t she?”
“That’s news to me.”
The redhead finally relented as Harry turned the corner of the hallway to his Defense class. Though Harry still saw him giving Harry considering looks in the hallway, he didn’t try to approach Harry again.
“Library, on the left, third shelf to the left and second one down,” Harry whispered to the Gryffindor prankster a few days afterward.
Prewett had nearly choked on his food in surprise at the unexpected acknowledgment from the Slytherin, but gave him a thumbs-up with a twinkle of mischief in his eyes.
Interestingly enough, not a single student bothered him in Potions again.
*
Slughorn invited him to the famed Slug Club third year.
The rest of the Slytherins were holding back from directly attacking him considering he had Slughorn’s favor and that he seemed to hold miraculous magical abilities. They were also, no doubt, trying to decipher the reason why Avery had been making an effort to sit beside him in class and Abraxas Malfoy was hovering around the edges of the unusual pairing of students.
(Harry wondered if he should try setting the belongings of more people on fire if it would mellow them out as they apparently had Malfoy).
There were more than a few scowls directed at him when he walked into the train compartment where his Head of House was sitting. Harry’s smile was venomous.
“Mr. Alder! Please, come join us.” Slughorn chuckled with jocularity, and Harry turned a more sincere smile to him and slipped into the seat two chairs down from the professor, right next to Avery. “I never did ask how that potion experiment from last year turned out! Any interesting results, my boy?”
Harry nodded at him and began to talk. Things were going to change.
*
It was Saturday in the afternoon when Claudius collapsed in the seat next to Harry with a groan. “Come on, Harry. It’s third year – it’s your chance to do something. You’re never going to be anything other than a – muggleborn – if you’re going to be so passive.”
It was something Claudius had been rather insistent on, as if Harry somehow needed to prove himself. As if he could tell Harry what to do after ignoring him for a good two years.
The issue was that two necessary parameters hadn’t been met thus far – he was waiting for the largest amount of students to gather in the common room, and he hadn’t yet decided what to do to cement people’s respect of him immediately. He didn’t have the time to slowly pick apart the misconception that he did not belong in the Wizarding World. It had been a bit of an experiment, with Claudius, who had come to at least begrudgingly listen to his ideas, but it involved Harry bending over too much to listen to his wrong opinions.
“Well, Claudius.” But Harry had recently settled on the perfect action – let him test the mettle of these purebloods who preached about their lineage with a holier-than-thou attitude. “Your pet rat is about to expire soon, is it not?”
Claudius, sharper than most, caught the insinuation in his voice and summoned it over. “I guess it is. Why?”
“Care much about it?”
“Not really, I guess. It was actually supposed to be –”
By now, most eyes had discretely turned in their direction as they had the first time Claudius had acted civilly to the resident Slytherin mudblood.
Needless to say, not a single person expected what would happen when Harry reached out to the rat, and it stiffened and twitched in Claudius’ hands. Claudius pulled his hands back reflexively with an expression of profound horror as the animal blackened slowly, darkness creeping up like a parasite. When the animal fell on the smooth floor of the common room, it fell apart into dust.
The entire room was silent.
See what I could have done to you? The meaning in Harry’s actions was so clear that even Claudius, the only Slytherin that Harry was amicable to, was shaking in fear. Is the magic any of you hold as ancient and powerful as mine? Do you dare do anything about it?
“Your problems are solved, anyhow.” Harry smiled without much remorse. Everyone in the room knew that his words were not only directed at Avery. “Is there anything else you want me to do?”
Claudius shook his head. With a flourish of his wand, Harry floated a book that he’d borrowed over and set about his continued search for the remains of the family he belonged to.
*
Defense had recently become one of Harry’s favorite classes. Third year was when the practical component of the class really began to shine, which only cemented his place in Slytherin even further.
Even the few that still firmly believed that Harry didn’t belong, despite all his talents, didn’t find it in themselves to act like they had before when Harry crushed all his opponents mercilessly in the practice duels Professor Merrythought had them do. Harry didn’t have it in himself to care about them – no different than the muggle children at the orphanage, who was he to care if they didn’t see how powerful he was?
But he couldn’t help but feel his fondness for the class and Professor Merrythought drop just a little bit as his heart palpitated faster in his chest and he felt a cold sweat break over him.
Before Harry stood him. A reflection of him, at least. His childhood – his weakness, his lack of control, his willingness to comply and apologize and beg for someone to change something because he could do nothing.
(Better off dead.)
So Harry waved his wand with a clearly intonated “Riddikulus!”
There was a scream, an echoing wail, as the boy who had been crying softly was torn into black and white, as if physically warping into a photograph, as the contortion was shoved into a page in a blank book. Just as he had envisioned. The last chapter in his life. Something he could tuck away into a dusted bookshelf and never look at again, despite him once thinking that the despair was all there was to life. And wasn’t that ultimately irony, the hilarity that came with becoming so much more?
Harry thought it was rather poetic.
The classroom was very quiet when Harry turned around, and students snapped their heads away from where they had obviously been straining to see and understand what his Boggart had been.
Harry all but sneered at the similarly disturbed expressions on his companions’ face, and Antonin Dolohov quickly took Harry’s place.
The sight was not forgotten among the Slytherins, Harry knew. In their eyes, he had dragged someone who had been his greatest fear into a nightmarish and almost tortuous scenario, twisted and forced into a book for eternity. And he found that funny.
Let them think that, then. Clearly, no one was willing to bother him again.
*
“Are you alright, Harry?”
Harry had just spent the summer being forcibly moved from everything he knew, evacuated with hundreds of other children and the few possessions he had left behind to burn.
Dumbledore had still refused to help him, despite the whispers of a bombing that was going to occur near Wool’s, that had frightened the other children so much that they didn’t even bother Harry anymore. There was a battle on two fronts, not just in the Wizarding World. Harry didn’t know why the senile old man just refused to admit it.
It was during that month, shivering in an encroaching fear, that he realized despite his control over death there was still a fundamental flaw in his abilities. Accelerating death was simple. He had simply utilized an essence that was already there. Inhibition of death was more complicated. But he’d been able to do that – to slow down breathing and contain what was leaking out, enough so that a healer could come look at the wound. His oddly fast healing was likely reflective of that. Reanimation wasn’t terribly difficult anyway – as Harry learned, it was similar to the forbidden imperio curse. Harry simply needed to force his will upon the subject and jerk their body around like a puppet.
But he had no clue how to reverse death.
It was laughable. It was the first thing many people thought of when they heard the words ‘Necromancy.’ But try as he might, with fallen birds or dead saplings or crushed beetles, he could not at all bring someone back from the dead.
In fact, he’d learned about the legend of the Deathly Hallows, the supposed artifacts of the Peverells – their image perverted by Grindelwald’s reign of terror. The supposed artifacts demonstrated the family’s – his lineage’s – control over death. The control he didn’t have.
It was unacceptable.
Abraxas, who was starting to look uncomfortably at the other Slytherins in the train compartment, startled when Harry spoke with an unexpected grin that was hiding boiling emotions underneath its exterior. These Slytherins, much more naïve than they had appeared the first two years at Hogwarts, lived in the comfort of their sheltered homes and did not know the extent to which the world was going mad around them.
“Of course I am, Abraxas. I heard your parents organized a particularly grand gathering this year? How was it?”
Harry realized as he spoke the words that Abraxas would interpret them as a pointed threat – the Malfoys would never invite Harry Alder to one of their parties. Abraxas did smile awkwardly, a hint of guilt in the downward turn of his lips, as he clearly deliberated about what to say.
Druella Rosier spoke up quietly. “It was entertaining and quite fascinating. There was a particularly humorous event regarding the wards on the floo – do you remember it, Caesar?”
Nott caught on quickly. “Right. Harry, you would not believe what happened to Parkinson – she’s a year below us…”
And if Abraxas’s apprehension melted away as he traded fond insults with Caesar, and Druella watched on in unhidden amusement, and even the normally quiet Antonin and Nerva Mulciber barely held back their smirks at the spectacle –
And if he felt Claudius lean in, just a little bit, toward him, Harry wouldn’t speak a word about it. But he decided to keep the moment in his heart.
*
“You’re certain you had nothing to do with it, Mr. Alder? You have nothing more to tell me?” Dumbledore inquired once more, and at this, even Dippet turned around with an exasperated shake of his head.
“No, sir. Nothing.” Harry’s answer was resolute and hid the fear that had stricken his heart at the thought that Hogwarts had almost closed.
“Dumbledore, he’s already said he had nothing to do with the disturbance, and his fellow Slytherins have confirmed his alibi!” Dippet chuckled. “Your bias may be getting the better of you.”
There was a tense moment when Harry simply raised an eyebrow at Dumbledore and took care to avoid the twinkling eyes that would no doubt be clouded with disbelief. “Perhaps it is, Dippet. Very well, Mr. Alder – off you go.”
“Thank you sir.” Harry tilted his head in a manner that would seem only respectful to the Headmaster sitting in the room.
And if it turned out the half-giant and his giant pet Acromantula were the ones to have caused the disturbance in the Forbidden Forest and the reason for the half-rotted Unicorn corpses on the ground…
(In the wrong place at the wrong time).
Harry was the one who received the award for finding the culprit. The Slytherins cheered at the newest honor that their Prefect had won. The other students and teachers congratulated him.
Dumbledore had handed him the reward with stiff movements only visible to the two of them.
I know you were the one who did it, his actions read clearly.
Harry smiled as he took the reward and was ushered forward to have his picture taken. You can’t prove a thing.
*
Harry crossed out another idea, then decided to put down his notebook as he closed his tired eyes and focused on the conversation occurring around him. He’d had a breakthrough, just a little before, when the dead plant he’d been cultivating had seemed a shade healthier and twitched before growing – but it had scattered into ashes soon later.
Maybe Harry could forgive Mark, who had been (unfairly) adopted years ago, just a little. It did feel good, being at the center of attention, the pillar that others leaned on for support and thus would never abandon him. It was distracting, at the very least, after two terms of endless experimentation and studying.
“This is so stupid.” Titus Lestrange tossed a crumbled ball of paper toward Claudius, who scowled at him.
“Go complain to Babbling, and stop assaulting me!”
“This is unreasonable,” Titus insisted again as ran his hand down his face and reached backward to let his hair, which had been tied into a ponytail, down. “But I need that Outstanding.”
Claudius rolled his eyes. “Maybe you would have that outstanding if you didn’t wait until the last moment to do your work! How many detentions do you want?”
Titus turned a not-so-subtle glance to the leader of the Slytherins and, unofficially, their tutor.
Harry hummed quietly as he reached forward to read through Titus’ analysis.
It was laughably simple, really. For all the purebloods spoke of their ambitions and beliefs, it did not stop them from being influenced by Harry. A simple twist of the ideologies he aimed to pursue – the preservation of old Wizarding traditions and greater magical integration and isolation from the muggle world – and every single one of them danced to his tune.
Subtly, Harry had been spreading a few of his ideas around. He was going to change the world, he had already decided. There was so much that could be changed – and he already had the vocal support of a few of his most trusted. The uselessness that had plagued his muggle life before was going to change, and soon he wasn’t going to need to be forced back to Wool’s.
*
“It’s just that I don’t trust any of the other professors. They might misunderstand, you see – but I know that you wouldn’t.” Harry paced around the Potions classroom as the other students filed out, deliberately not glancing back. “You’re different, sir. I know you know a lot more about the various families in Britain than most.”
Slughorn nodded with a large smile and leaned forward, a crystallized pineapple in his hand. It had been not hard to ask the older Slytherins about the professor’s tastes. “I do indeed, Harry. Is there something you need? Not schoolwork, I assume, talented as you are.”
Harry smiled back. “No, sir. Consider this one of my…personal pursuits. I’d recently come across a bit of – rare magic, you see. It’s connected to the Ancient House of Peverell. Yet, from my understanding, there have been no known family members in over centuries. Do you know who they are, sir?”
It was as if Slughorn’s entire contour froze. “What family?”
“The Peverells, sir.”
“Merlin’s beard…you are speaking of Necromancy?”
“I am indeed, sir. It’s just that I am aware that bloodline magic isn’t banned by the ministry, yet I can find very few sources about both Necromancy and the Peverells. With the knowledge you possess, I was sure you would have some general idea of the topics, professor.”
Even with a paling complexion, Professor Slughorn managed to smile at him. “Of course…it’s just that Necromancy is very dark magic. And this is all – all purely theoretical, yes?”
“Of course, sir.” Harry dipped his head respectfully. “I wouldn’t go around using magic I know nothing about.”
“That’s very good, Harry.” Slughorn let out of those soft chuckles. The edge in his laughter did not go unnoticed. “Unfortunately, I am not any more aware of the fate of the Peverells as you are.”
“And what of Necromancy?” Harry stopped his pacing to stand directly to the side of Slughorn. “There are four major branches – but what of the reversal of death? Can Necromancy not, in theory, grant anyone immortality? In the case that they may permanently reverse Death on a specific person?” He dimmed the intensity of his voice as he observed Slughorn’s tension rise to a degree even larger than what he’d displayed before.
Slughorn let out a shaky breath. He definitely seemed more disturbed about this specific aspect of Necromancy – and it was more difficult, Harry knew. He still hadn’t been able to grasp the ability, and he certainly didn’t trust the other teachers enough that they would deliberately keep this conversation a secret from certain prying ears and twinkling eyes. “There have indeed been theories regarding this – but there is always a price to pay with magic as dark as this.” Slughorn shook his head. “In trying to manipulate death, Harry, one may indeed very well take….sacrifice countless lives.”
“But there are other sources among the Wizarding World, hidden as they may be, that support this conclusion?” Slughorn’s warnings were not unwarranted, but this power was inherent to Harry. He knew he could control it.
“Harry…this is all academic, yes? All hypothetical.” He didn’t answer the question.
“Of course. As I said, sir, all hypothetical.” Harry decided not to push him any further, but when he walked away he did so with a new confidence.
*
Caesar and Mulciber were the most helpful among his followers in helping him find the rest of the Peverells, given that no one seemed to know what had happened to the once-respected family. Not only did they have family members working in the Ministry, but their families also had records of some of the other pureblood lines – helpful, because as Harry had found out, the Vixen in the Wizarding World were very closely related.
It was only during the end of sixth year that he’d had a breakthrough – a Squib line that had descended from the last family the Peverells had married into decades ago, the Potters.
He was disappointed when Christmas break came around during seventh year and Harry, with a long-held tentative hope in his heart, knocked on the door where his father apparently was.
“A freak,” his real father spit at him, having abandoned him and his mother on purpose, and wanting nothing to do with the Wizarding World that had apparently taken his conscience and will away. A loveless marriage, Harry realized with an apathy steeped in venom he didn’t realize he’d held within him. With it borne a realization that he would never have family.
He spent the rest of seventh year as he always did.
He maintained his position as Head Boy and received Os on all of his coursework and his NEWTS.
He waited in silence until the end of the school year came and his Slytherin class disbanded into the real world with promises and delusions and whispers, with Harry at the head of it all.
It was weeks after Hogwarts ended that Nelson Alder’s body was found, disintegrated to ashes. It was a miracle, muggle newspapers chronicled, that the mother and daughter had managed to escape the devastating flames and the devouring smoke that poured from their family home.
Few knew the truth of what had happened in that tragic accident. One was the man who had just been made Headmaster of a famous Wizarding school. The second was one that had walked away from the home, holding his first extracted soul and only a fraction of his heart in his chest, the other part having been burned to ash.
*
To start influencing the thoughts of the Wizarding World, there was no better place to start than the institution that nursed the minds of the children of the next generation. Harry walked into the office knowing that Dumbledore, now Headmaster and having just defeated the greatest Dark Lord in over a century, would reject his application. Perhaps it was simply out of curiosity or nostalgia that he went anyway.
(He would deny the small gratitude he had toward the man who getting rid of the man who had stolen his symbol, nor the odd fear-anger that came along with it).
Harry simply accepted the failure and continued what he had been working on the last few years of school, gone unknown even among those that constituted the body of his most trusted.
*
“I heard what your goals were,” Ignatius repeated with a tired tone of voice as he stared seriously at Harry, a far cry from the prankster he’d been back at Hogwarts.
There were whispers of a rising Dark Lord years after Grindelwald had fallen, with goals much closer to what the traditional families in Britain sought after. Whispers of someone who aimed to preserve the traditions that were slowly being stripped away by a newer Light-orientated and radical Wizemgamot and the growing influence of the new Chief Warlock. Someone who was not afraid to act – politically or otherwise. Someone who was powerful, and who could protect them. Someone willing to bring magic back to a world broken by war.
Harry nodded to Druella, who walked forward to the man, wand already in her hand. Below her arm was a marking, his symbol returned to him, an onyx-colored wing embracing the symbol like a crown, feathers brushing the mark like a kiss of death.
There was talk of opposition forming already – ironically, it was a combination of those who believed firmly in the new laws of the Wizarding World that were killing it, and the select few who knew who he really was and had no wishes in following a – “mudblood.”
He couldn’t touch the Blacks, Harry knew. They were much too influential and powerful. But a few – Orion, Alphard, and Lucretia – had already pledged themselves to him. The thought was satisfying enough.
Now, a member of a family that had supposedly supported Dumbledore’s policies had come to Harry of his own volition. Whether or not he was a spy was another issue, but Harry doubted forces had been organized that quickly. He was, unfortunately, never able to master the Mind Arts. But no matter – he would test loyalty himself.
“You realize what you will have to do, Ignatius?” Harry cocked his head, something in his voice so broken thus that a few masked figures – porcelain white, with flecks of golden lining decorating the very edges of the mask – behind him couldn’t control a flinch. “Are you willing to sacrifice your freedom to aid my cause?”
As Druella finished keying Ignatius into the wards, he tilted his body into a bow. “I am, My Lord. If there’s anyone that can reverse the situation in the Wizarding World…”
The rest of his words went unsaid. If the man rumored to have mastered Necromancy was the one leading the movement, one clearly unafraid of utilizing any form of Magic and upholding the values he’d so proclaimed, then he was the best chance that some wizards and witches had at making a change.
Minutes later, Harry felt a bond snap in place and gained a new follower – subsequently, more influence in the Wizemgamot – and a satisfaction that his ideas were gaining traction despite Dumbledore’s interference.
*
Harry sensed dissent among the Knights of Walpurgis, as he’d taken to formally naming the group, the first time they went on a raid.
Abraxas, Orion, and Ignatius were his main voices in the Wizemgamot. They held the resources, money, and pre-established influence to subtly shift policies to be more moderate. But Harry knew that with Dumbledore’s power, under no circumstances was a purely political route going to work if he was going to change the Wizarding World.
Harry pulled aside Lucretia and Caesar and he ordered them to prepare potions and work on refining and creating spells. He individually worked with the rest of his Knights on their dueling technique. There was an unspoken atmosphere among them, some anticipatory and some dreading, as they waited for the final thread to snap.
Harry waited as well.
The thread snapped when at Hogwarts, Defense was changed to Defense Against the Dark Arts, a brutally explicit indication of the direction the Wizarding World was heading – choking out its own magic.
Days later the Manor of one of Dumbledore’s major supporters was attacked. The masked assailants were met with organized opposition, and both sides retreated without any serious casualties.
There wasn’t supposed to be casualties – it had been a plan, to draw attention of and discussion among the general populace to the current actions of the Ministry, to indicate action taken to possibly recruit more Knights, and to start spreading fear among those in the Wizemgamot to make them more compliant.
Then Abraxas informed him of abstruse questioning and investigations being made by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. There were more attacks, scattered among the following months, and investigation hammered down on the Dark families, even the ones that weren’t yet involved in the Knights – the Bulstrodes and the Yaxleys, and even grey families like the Greengrasses and the Selwyns. Ironically enough, the Ministry’s bias behind the attempts to weed out those involved in the attacks only earned Harry more supporters.
Some of his original Knights had already had heirs who would be attending the slowly-desecrated Hogwarts in a few years. Time was slipping between his fingers, Harry realized, folding itself over and approaching Death.
It was 1956 when the Knight’s first raid on Diagon Alley occurred. There were no deaths, but there were a few casualties.
There was a dichotomy among those – some, like Antonin or Druella, felt such action was necessary. Others, like Ignatius or Abraxas, were less inclined to such measures. But an ideal kept them bound together – in the end, their lord was acting as he had promised to do so, with whispers of his future plans to come.
(A perfect power source for souls, a voice whispered. Whatever route you choose, you achieve the same goal).
They managed to keep a few books on Dark magic in the market and on the shelves of Hogwarts. They managed to cut down on voices that called for the banning of more traditional celebrations in favor of bringing in new ones. The law that was going to ban the use of magics more specific to bloodlines – blood, mind, necromantic – was eliminated.
Harry felt, as the days went on, himself growing colder. It was numbness, he reasoned, as casualties did start popping up among the raids, and as Knights began coming home with greater and bloodier injuries.
But it was as if the coldness spread, a foreign disease, a venom, seeping into his veins. Near lighthearted discussion faded among the meetings Harry called, replaced with silence.
The first time Harry had punished one of the Knights – Mcnair, one of the newer recruits – for his inability to act in the ministry, he’d wandlessly tugged the man closer to death. By the end, the man was nearly choking himself just to draw in the necessary amount of air to breathe.
As time passed, there was a new prevailing emotion among his Knights, even among those who he’d gone to Hogwarts. Awe, hope, nervousness – but the greatest one was fear, an emotion that had originally dissipated among the original Slytherins throughout the school years.
Harry found that he didn’t care as much as he thought he would.
*
It was when clawed beasts tore at his skin and blood dotted the runes around him that Lord Peverell looked up that the large figure twitched below up stood up as if waking up from an endless slumber.
With the Grim stalking beside him, and power dancing about his figure, his heart shattered into the void that was the scattering of the countless screaming voices in his soul.
*
The hall fell into a hush when Lord Peverell walked into the room, footsteps quiet, tremulous in the silence, echoing in the hall. He came to a stop, just before the body that lay before him.
“My lord?” A singular voice cracked from where Claudius stood quietly, his voice lighter than a murmur in the wind.
Peverell held out a single finger and Claudius fell quiet and strode the single length more directly in front of the cold body of a pale blonde, eyes shut as if in sleep. It was a Rosier, he recognized almost blearily, like Druella.
When gold flowed and crackled in the air, and he heard cries and gasps and choked-back sobs when the – boy – snapped his eyes open and sat up clutching his chest and shaking. Someone on the sidelines stepped forward.
Peverell turned away, looking closer to the boy’s age than those he had grown up with as if he was a disquiet sculpture that looked eerily too close to being a human. The edges of his form wavered as if he was oscillating between the delicate boundary of existence and nonexistence.
None of the other Knights protested the Grim stalking among the shadows near them again.
*
One of his Knights brought back news of a prophecy that was meant to spell out his downfall. Chances were that Dumbledore and his little Order had already caught wind of the situation.
The first lead the Order had in defeating Peverell in years of skirmishes and raids and battles, steadily decreasing in number as their enemies only seemed to grow in number. Did Dumbledore realize how little his chances were at defeating him and his immortal army, willing to cling to the life of a child?
How could he take that chance?
It was word from their spy, a Lestrange told him, that they’d found out where one of the children who matched the description that he had described to them. The other was an heir Harry had no interest in seeing – his interest was glued on the poverty-stricken family and the little half-blood boy that represented a fall from the glory of the legacy they should have inherited.
Irritating.
Let the followers who had been begging for a chance to help their lord and kill any enemy that stood in his way, deal with the other child.
Let him find this family, that had so begged for protection from Dumbledore.
*
Neither can live…
Days later, a flash of green glowed and a mother took one final breath.
A spirit snapped and flickered between realms.
And the boy in the cradle woke up, laying atop the grave of his mother, and cried.