Chapter Text
He came back to awareness in what simultaneously seemed all of a second while also several lifetimes from when he’d zoned out in the maze grabbing hold of the cup.
Suddenly he had at least a significant portion of other lives stuffed into his head. His life, his memories, just with differences, big and small, spanning off into the future by a few years.
Various futures spinning in his mind, so that he barely comprehended what was happening as the portkey spat him out in a familiar graveyard.
Then, with horror, he recognized the young man in Hufflepuff Hogwarts robes standing beside him as he was turning to help Harry stand because one of his legs was partially broken from when he’d saved Cedric from the giant spider.
‘Oh no.’ He thought with familiar dread sinking into his bones.
Cedric asked if he was told the tri-wizard cup was a portkey and he shook his head, a plan coming to mind as he gathered his magic silently and in the hand not holding a wand reached the magic to subtly wrap around his leg to set the bone cracks into alignment and firmly bind them.
Although not healed, it wouldn’t hinder his movements as much and the bone would heal properly when he could later manage to put some healing magic into it.
Not noticing Harry’s distraction, nor the presence watching Harry and already approaching them, Cedric spoke what were his final words each time in the other lives Harry had remembered. “Wands out, d’you reckon?”
Harry emphatically nodded his head yes and looked towards the direction Pettigrew was coming from while carrying Tom Riddle in his homunculus form, some disturbing mix of a child-sized human and snake-like monster, wrapped in a bundle.
Nagini slithering silently behind the man, who had betrayed Harry’s father, as a threat to ensure he wouldn’t back out from performing the ritual to resurrect the dark lord he bound himself to with the magical brand on his arm.
Cedric turned to face the same way with his wand up as Harry again reached in towards his magic, annoyed at the presence of the nine seals he could now clearly sense inside him. Three from his parents, Mum’s two-fold Evanson magic seals and Dad’s Peverell one.
‘The only three that should’ve ever been on him.’ he thought bitterly.
The other six an annoying clash of forces that bound the powers that belonged to him, his suppressed birthright. Then there was that disgusting soul scrap, beginning to stir as it felt another of its like approaching. He channeled his magic to flow through himself as best he could with all those factors.
Wandlessly he cast soft invisible magic over Cedric’s form, constructing an illusion that would perfectly mimic him as he stood there now and disappear in a flash of green matching the spell about to hit it. Then he reached out and cast two more unseen and nearly unfelt spells alongside a silencing charm.
Cedric’s body fell back, arms spread out, unable to move, and appearing to be dead on the ground. All of which went unperceived by the approaching forms as he was kept invisible for the moment. Then the bit of soul scrap in Harry’s forehead flared with pain. He let himself crumple a bit, stuffing his wand into a hidden spot on his body and latching onto Cedric’s.
Tracing a bit of blood and magic into small runes on Cedric’s chest, just under his collar, doing the same to the wand and letting a flare of magic connect the two in what would be an a powerful attracting force when activated, before dropping the wand as another flare of pain burst through the scar on his forehead.
Then he heard the words oft repeated in his nightmares of recollection. “Kill the spare.”
Then Pettigrew pointed his master’s wand at the illusion of Cedric and cast “Avada Kedavra!” in his screech of a voice and green light shot out with a jagged wand movement.
Harry’s magic lifted a nearby boulder a few centimeters off the ground and dropped it with a thud that imitated what the sound of what Cedric’s body hitting the earth would have made as he let the spell hiding Cedric’s form dissolve as the green light faded.
The silencing and immobilizing magic still firmly in place, maintaining the pretense of a corpse though he still breathed. ‘It worked.’ Harry thought triumphantly as he was harshly grabbed and dragged over to the gravestone of the Muggle father of his enemy once again, then tied there and gagged.
The ritual happened the same as he remembered. Giant snake slithering about as Pettigrew quaked and dragged over the large stone cauldron. Tom Riddle’s repeated hisses to hurry as his rat like servant screwed his face in disgust and dropped his small form into the bubbling concoction. The way it changed colours with the bone dust from the grave beside them, the Rat’s hand, and finally then Harry’s blood, his mother’s blood magic protections within.
‘His mistake.’ Harry thought bitterly as Riddle was robed and Pettigrew crumpled in pain as Nagini continued to slither in circles.
Voldemort gave the speech about his parentage, tossed Wormtail about and summoned his followers with the dark mark now visible on the Rat’s arm. They crawled in the dirt of the graveyard kissing Riddle’s robes, as their master questioned how faithful and loyal they’d been over the past thirteen years in his absence.
Avery fell down begging, before writhing on the ground as he was crucioed. Riddle continued to preach before rewarding his Rat with a silver hand that had later killed the man in Harry’s memories of other lives, a curse upon it that would see its possessor strangled if it sensed he ever did anything to betray his master again.
Riddle moved on to Malfoy, spoke of the Lestranges as his most faithful, then Macnair, Crabbe, Goyle, then Nott. Riddle interrupted the man who would technically be Harry’s father-in-law from some of the other lives still turning about in his mind, ones where his inheritance managed to break through, and Harry would have gotten another four seals, one from the ministry’s pink toad and three from his ill-fated mentor who’d die protecting Harry and often end up caspered.
That thought further solidified Harry’s resolve, gathering magic and pushing the soul scrap and the seals forward inside himself like shields he was fighting to detach from himself, angling them to take a lot of the blow of the Unforgivables soon to be cast upon him.
Harry felt disgusted as that boney white finger pressed into his scar, but held back and used the sensation to try to further separate the soul scrap from his own inner being, letting the natural pull of like to like between Riddle and the bit of his soul he didn’t know had broken off from him gravitate towards each other.
The man didn’t notice, still drunk on the resurrection of his body and the joy he felt having followers scraping at the ground at his feet and staring at him with marvel.
He continued to play to his audience, unaware of the threat Harry possessed due to knowing things he should not at this point in time. Knowledge beyond anything Riddle could have imagined due to never leaving this realm with its restricted and dull wizardry magic.
Riddle recounted his tale from the death of Harry’s mother, the loss of his body, possessions of animals, Quirrel, Harry thwarting him in first year, Wormtail returning to his side with Bertha Jorkins in hand, her information on the tri-wizard’s tournament and Crouch Jr. Finally he triumphantly recounted Harry’s capture and his means of resurrection before he turned and cast crucio upon him still tied to the gravestone.
Harry endured and directed the flow of the torture curses magic upon the seals binding his soul and magic powers, he felt cracks form upon them as they frayed and he could pull from around and beneath them. Shocked to discover, while looking inward, that the soul corridor he’d constructed for himself in another life was present. The twenty-five different doors connecting his soul to others his soul had chosen and been chosen by.
Two positioned differently from the rest, one he knew led to Maurice Elswood, his mentor that became a true soulbonded one over the course of a couple of the lives Harry’s mind recalled. Lives that had clearly happened already according to Harry’s soul, as he at last remembered his Submissive friend.
A girl his age glowing gold on a battlefront as they both trembled in grief. Then Harry remembered she was the only direct child of the man Harry knew to be gifted with magics that manipulated time. He recalled his friend glowing an ever brighter gold with power as she looked at Harry and reached for him, then… then Harry knew no more beyond that point. It was where all his memories ended in the lives where he inherited.
‘Did she…?’ But that wasn’t important Harry thought as he channeled love and longing towards and through the cracks of all the doors along the corridor constructed in his soul, before broadcasting warning, he couldn’t guarantee what would happen and some things might result in backlash towards the connections his soul had to theirs.
He didn’t even know them all, some of those doors had never opened as Harry hadn’t met them in any of what he now realized weren’t other lives, but time loops. Loops his soul, and now his mind, remembered.
Riddle had Wormtail release Harry and he dropped to the ground. He immediately put his plans in motion. Using blood and a prick of magic on his fingers tips to imitate claws he carved runes on the side of the grave stone. Ones to summon an individual, someone of Harry’s kin. Before he could finish and then activate it Pettigrew was back and shoving Cedric’s wand into his other hand.
Now Riddle wanted to start his mockery of a duel. Harry allowed himself to be pushed into a bow by the other’s magic, but more shallowly than in the original loops. The mocking laughter of the thirty or so men standing about was enough to keep Riddle from realizing, though.
Harry was almost distracted though when he’d heard the words “…bow to death.” He had no problem bowing to Lady Death, more than one soul dear to him belonged to Her courts after all, including the family member he intended to summon. But Riddle calling himself death had sent a coil of indignant outrage through him.
Harry knew Death and the man who named himself ‘flee from death’ was not Her. He was offended on behalf of his Hellhound family members, his Reaper soulbonded future Ace, and what he’d learned of his Peverell legacy from the couple loops he didn’t inherit, and all the others where he did and met his great granduncle Lewis.
Harry quickly suppressed the emotions feigning a fear he didn’t feel despite being surrounded by hostile men who wished him dead and Nagini slithering behind her master. Harry allowed a second attack of the crucio to hit him going down to the ground leaning against the grave as he again manipulated the curse’s magic to attack the seals and soul shard, lessening the damage to his body and nerves immensely but outwardly playing otherwise.
Standing up Riddle taunted with the offer of a break and tried to make him beg with a cast of imperius. When Harry boldly threw him off he didn’t duck out of the way as he originally would have at this point, instead he took the crucius curse for a third time and felt the soul dampener and wizarding magic seals shatter into nothing.
Once more leaning back against the grave Harry climbed up and immediately touched his runes about to specify a Hellhound designation along with the name of Thorne Macaslan as his intended target, as Riddle once more taunted him. But as he touched the already carved runes wild magic spread about and poured into and activated them.
Harry didn’t need to feign shock when a person who was certainly not his great grandfather, Lord Thorne Macaslan, arrived along the side of the grave where he’d carved the runes. Instead scales of blue and silver that indicated a Submissive rank of likely a half or quarter Merrow, given the way their skin was paling to the olive hue of a Mediterranean skin tone as they dried in the night air.
Then he noticed the many, arm width sized, cut off tubes hanging out of them from where the ends were embedded in their skin, on different parts across their body, and a sort of chemical smelling gel oozed off them. As if they’d been ported directly out of some lab tank or something…
Harry’s mind spiraled at the implications the fellow Submissive’s state caused him to think of, but the most important point was that they were vulnerable and Harry had accidentally drawn them into the middle of a fight, somehow.
Before he could think of anything or try to redo the runes to summon a Hellhound into scaring Riddle and his followers into fleeing, the Submissive looked blearily at him and called out. “James…? James is that you? Where’s Lily?”
Before Harry could respond Pettigrew seemed to recognize the Submissive and addressed them as ‘Cass’.
“Pettigrew?” the Submissive seemed to almost sneer in disgust and Harry immediately liked them, the curl of their lip a perfect replica of Queen Killigan’s. Before they looked around, seeming to acknowledge that Harry wasn’t his father, James, and then they saw the others.
“What have you done Pettigrew!? Where are James and Lily?!” A desperate edge entering their voice. This caused the crowd to start jeering, before one finally butted in and loudly declared that “…the Potters had been killed at the end of the Dark Lord’s wand over a dozen years ago.” Making a quip about how out of touch the strange person who appeared out of no where was.
Speculation about ‘the brat’s’ magic running wild and summoning a random former friend of his parents who hadn’t even known of their deaths after so many years. But Cass didn’t seem to be listening, instead the edges of patches of their scales still visible began to blacken as they shook their head and muttered denials, beginning to tremble.
The jeering just got louder as Cass seemed to fall into a state of shock out of grief. Harry pulled sharply on his magic and threw a shield around Cass and threw a powerful burst of wind out in a circle around them.
Next, he pointed Cedric’s wand and sliced Pettigrew’s silver hand off above where it had been fixed to his arm. Before then casting a disarming spell at another death eater standing next to him, wand flying wide and landing near Riddle.
Then Harry sent as powerful a stunning spell as he could, while simultaneously he’d reached out with the air, lifting the tri-wizard cup and Cedric’s body. Then using the runes he’d placed on Cedric and Cedric’s wand Harry propelled them all together with the attracting force, the portkey floating halfway between the wand and Cedric.
Cedric’s wand slammed into Pettigrew before his stunned body could fall to the ground. It propelled him and the other stunned death eater caught up with him to Cedric and the tri-wizard cup ended up between them as they collided.
So Harry’s plan of getting Cedric Diggory and Peter Pettigrew to be portkeyed to the champion’s stage just outside of the maze of the third task had worked, even with an additional stunned death eater accompanying them, that shouldn’t pose a problem.
Cass seemed to have snapped out of things and wisely moved to crouch behind the tall stone marking another grave next to the one belonging to Riddle’s father, an extra protection along with Harry’s shield.
Harry turned back to Riddle and pretended to tremble in shock, as if he hadn’t meant to end up stuck here without a wand in hand.
Riddle didn’t need much convincing, immediately mocking Harry and reassuring that he had his death eater back at Hogwarts, who’d be able to return his other servants to him shortly. How even if he couldn’t manage that, they’d simply be rescued with the rest of his faithful ones when he liberated them from Azkaban.
Then Riddle declared himself tired of this game and shot the killing curse at Harry. Harry made sure to push the soul scrap inside of him forward, with the death and prophecy seals tied to it and the soul seal from Dumbledore taking any damage that passed them.
As he let his body fall down he heard Cass scream and felt soul magic fill the air causing the bonds tied to his own soul to fill with the magic in a sweet ache.