lomonaaeren

Chapter Thirty.

Chapter One.

Title: Kairos Amid the Ruins (31/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry Potter/Orion Black, Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald, mentions of various canon pairings
Content Notes: Time travel, heavy angst, Harry mentoring Severus, violence, gore, minor character deaths, AU
Rating: R
Summary: Harry’s attempt to time travel and fix the past went badly awry. Time shattered, and the various pieces of the universe clung to each other as best they could. Harry finds himself in 1961, with Albus Dumbledore the Minister for Magic, Gellert Grindelwald his loving husband, Voldemort newly defeated…and Severus Snape being proclaimed the Boy-Who-Lived
Author’s Note: This is going to be a long story, focusing on Harry mentoring Severus as the Boy-Who-Lived, with flashbacks to an alternate World War II. The Harry-Severus mentorship will remain gen. However, the romantic pairings are a prominent part of the story. The word “Kairos” comes from the Greek, meaning a lucky moment, or the right moment, to act.

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Chapter Thirty-One—By My Will

The ritual was sinking deeper, wrenching at Harry’s bones with what felt like claws. He set his teeth and braced his ankles. There was little to brace them against, other than the iron bars sunken into the floor, but those would do.

The flash of spellfire came from the side where Orion and Snape dueled. Prince watched them, his wand still now. Harry closed his eyes to shut out all the other distractions. He couldn’t depend on someone to come and help him.

But his own help would do.

The ritual was spiraling into him, and Harry could see memories of his first timeline flashing past him: Ron’s grinning face, Hermione with her arms stretching out to embrace him, Molly Weasley knitting a jumper, his parents’ smiling faces in a photograph, Dumbledore’s tomb, the proud towers of Hogwarts, the pillars in the Chamber of Secrets, his godfather falling through the veil in the Department of Mysteries with a surprised gasp, the neat garden of Number 4 Privet Drive, Dobby’s teary eyes.

That’s how the ritual works. It drags the memories up to the top of my mind. It exploits my longing to go back there.

It was nothing more than an intuition, not something he’d seen written down, but the minute he had the thought, the shuddering, scraping motion paused.

Harry smiled grimly. The ritual needed his blood and bone, the memories of the timeline imprinted and sunken in them, but it needed his longing more. Gellert longed to go back to that timeline, and so did Snape, but that wasn’t enough, not when neither of them was lying here chained to these iron bars.

Harry braced his feet again, and turned his mind to what surrounded him here, in this timeline where he was desired and needed and required and wanted.

Severus’s wide, stubborn eyes watching him. Mariana’s bravery when she had deceived her husband and ultimately fled from him. Regulus falling asleep in his arms. Sirius laughing in a way that Harry had never heard the one of his original timeline laugh.

Mad silver fire danced at the corners of his eyes, and Harry ignored it with an effort. That was the original timeline trying to come back. No. He had to focus on this one.

Professor Rowan looking at him in faint exasperation, wanting to help him but not knowing how. The Potters staring at him in distrust; they didn’t like him, but at least they existed here, instead of all being dead the way they were in the other world. His students asking him questions and laughing and dueling him.

Orion, caring for him enough to come and fight a master duelist like Severus Snape for him.

Harry spun the images around him like a whirlpool, not sure if what he was doing was right, only knowing that it seemed right. And then he let out a deep breath, and kicked the iron bars fastened into the floor at his feet.

They broke with a ringing crack.

From the corner of his eye, Harry saw Seneca Prince whip around to face him. He ignored him, and kicked again, and again, and again. The bars ripped out of the floor with a clang, even though they had been so firmly fastened not a moment before. And then Harry drew his arms down, and the bar they had been chained to came with them.

The world around him felt soft and liquid. Harry sat up and spat several times. The magic preventing him from speaking was gone as if it had never existed.

“Hold still, Potter.”

Prince was aiming his wand at him, but Harry had never felt less intimidated. He gave the man an unimpressed look and ran his hands down his chest and legs. Yes, they felt all right. Even the soreness that had been building up in him when he was chained was gone.

“Hold him!”

That was Snape, screaming in what sounded like hysteria. Harry glanced up to see him driving Orion in a circle, the spells between them leaping and hissing like furious cobras. But they had turned so that Snape and not Orion was the one looking at him.

“Without him thinking of his own time, we cannot—” That was as far as Snape got before he had to leap and duck away from a curse, but Prince certainly understood the idea. He smiled unpleasantly at Harry.

“Hold still, and it will be over soon,” he all but crooned, taking a step towards Harry.

Harry lifted his hand. It didn’t make Prince do more than falter in his steps, but Harry wasn’t thinking of him. He was thinking of something else, something that he had never fully accepted before, no matter the years he had spent in this timeline. Always, part of him had resented that he’d lost his holly wand.

Now, he opened his mind and called for the Elder Wand, accepting it, welcoming it, telling it to save him.

The wand slammed through the tattered remains of the stone bubble that had encased him and which the iron bars had been attached to the floor of, and hit Harry’s hand. He felt a dull ache at the sting of the wood on his palm, but ignored that as he stood. Strength and warmth were flooding him now, not all of them his own.

Except that it was his own, as long as he accepted the Wand as his. Harry stood up and smiled at Prince.

“I believe we have a duel to get to,” he said.

And the first curse Prince tossed at him was the Incarcerous. Harry leaped over that, laughed, and went in for the kill.

*

Albus twisted out of the way of a wicked blue spell that he had never known the incantation for, since Gellert had always cast it silently, but whose effects he did know. It would bind Albus to a single memory, rendering him unable to form any new ones.

And Albus’s mind cracked and chilled and cooled, and what woke in the wake of that was rage.

Gellert as he had known him was gone. The marriage they had had was never coming back, all because Gellert wanted to believe that things could be different in a different timeline.

And that shattered the chains that had been holding Albus back. He hadn’t used his full power or every spell he knew because he didn’t want to hurt his husband. He had been using mostly minor hexes and curses with reversible effects, all because he had been sure that once he could hold Gellert still for a little while and talk to him, he would come back to his senses.

Meanwhile, Gellert had planned on erasing his mind.

Albus stood up straight and stared at his husband. Gellert hesitated for a moment, his eyebrows creeping up the minutest amount.

“Tired, Albus?”

This is the man I let the Wizengamot set up alarms in my mind for, Albus was thinking. This is the man I tarnished my reputation for, because so many people thought I should have killed him instead of letting him surrender and live with me. This is the man I married and committed my life to, while all the time he loved power more than me.

This is the man I sacrificed my integrity for.

Albus stood up and shook his head, both in response to his thoughts and to Gellert’s question. He couldn’t do anything about the past sacrifices he’d made and the useless reasons he’d made them for. But he could prevent himself from making more of them in the future.

“Let’s see you stand before this, Gellert,” he said softly, shifting the Elder Wand in his hand and feeling it begin to shine, the magic storming through it with more power as he accepted the death of his marriage. “Ventus ignis!”

The air around Albus whipped into a solid dark mass, a storm confined to a few meters above the ground. The winds began to pick up speed, traveling around each other in a way that made Albus have to look aside so he didn’t get dizzy.

And then they ignited.

The firestorm barreled towards Gellert, who barely managed to dodge the center of it. One stray tendril of fire caught his beard. Gellert cried out and slapped at it, reducing the flame to a wisp of smoke a moment later.

“Albus, you wouldn’t—”

The firestorm was already heading back in Gellert’s direction. Again he dodged, but Albus knew he wasn’t imagining the sharp breath rushing through his lungs or the way Gellert stumbled. He had already spent long minutes dueling. And he didn’t have the conviction that sustained Albus, now.

Albus had known, although he’d pretended not to when people questioned him, that he was at least a few measures stronger than Gellert. Not that it mattered, when they had been married and, he thought, united in purpose.

But now, it mattered. Now, he would use that greater magical power to destroy the madman who had tried to destroy the wizarding world, as Albus should have done before, when people urged him.

Gellert leaped aside from the firestorm with a cry, but this time, it didn’t spin past him and turn around. Instead, it hovered in place, and long burning tendrils grew outwards from it, spreading and herding Gellert into a killing space in the center. It would kill him, if Albus let it keep on doing what it was doing.

And Albus thought that was entirely right and fair and proper. Gellert would have killed him, after all, or done something that would have hurt even more.

“Albus,” Gellert whispered. “You wouldn’t kill an unarmed man.”

“You still have your wand.” Albus paced along the edge of the firestorm, watching how the flames wavered back and forth on the wings of the wind with an expert eye. He didn’t intend to let it spread out of control. That would make for much worse results, in the end.

With another cry, Gellert flung his wand away, and then stood there with his hands up and his knees shaking. Albus stared at him. It was not exactly the same posture he had taken on the day that Albus thought had ended his war, but it was astoundingly similar.

“I yield,” Gellert whispered. “I give up. I should never have started this madness in the first place. Albus, let’s just—let’s just go back home and forget about this, all right? I’m content to live in this timeline, and I’ll give up thoughts of resurrecting the other one.”

Albus swallowed, and held up his wand to slash a halt to the hovering firestorm. But he only stopped it from reaching further, rather than dismissing it. He stared at Gellert again, and felt the pressure of the flames against his own neck and back, and had no idea what to say.

He knew the crushing pressure of a choice he would have to make. But he had no idea what the right one to make was.

*

Orion laughed as he watched Severus Snape stumble over the Tripwire Jinx he had conjured, and not only because it was amusing. He had already seen how much mockery infuriated the man, and when he was angry, he fought less effectively. It was a tactic that Orion had used on dueling opponents before, although never with as much success.

And he could use the advantage. His muscles burned like hot iron, and he bore bleeding cuts and the aching joint that was an artifact of barely countering the Knee-Reversal Hex before it could land.

At the same time, Orion had no doubt he would win this duel. He had his all-consuming devotion for Harry to drive him into victory, while Snape was fighting out of hatred alone.

He had more evidence of that as he watched Snape settle his robe around himself and straighten up with his eyes blazing. He didn’t speak the next spell aloud, but the twisting, whiplash pattern of his wand told Orion well enough what it was.

Orion began building the appropriate response in his head, but in the meantime, he stood there and watched the purple light surge in the air between them, twisting on itself and gathering strength before it headed for him. Snape frowned, his face bending as if he wanted to ask a question but couldn’t bear to.

The purple light of the Regretful Life Curse finished building with a howl, and bowled straight towards Orion, apparently unstoppable unless one could raise a shield in the miniscule amount of time Orion had left.

But Orion knew the spell, and it would tear through an ordinary shield, since it targeted the mind and not the body. It was meant to freeze him in place while it paraded a stream of warped memories through his head, and he would be easy prey for the caster.

There was, however, a defense that worked precisely because it wasn’t an ordinary defense.

When the curse’s light was sparking hard on the outer perimeter of his mind, Orion spun his wand in the slight circle needed and barked out, “Revenire!”

He saw Snape’s eyes widen in the second before the Return Offensive formed a glassy shape in front of him, like a ramp leading from the floor, arching over Orion’s body, and up towards the ceiling. The curse hit it and rolled up the ramp, reaching the top, while Orion stood where he was, not bothering to duck due to his confidence in his spell, meeting Snape’s eyes and not turning away from them.

When it struck the top of the ramp, the Regretful Life Curse was launched as if from a slingshot back in the direction it had come from.

Snape fell to the floor with a scream that cut off as his face locked into a grimace. Orion dismissed the glassy ramp and turned around, limping a little, to see if Harry needed his help.

*

Prince wasn’t a bad dueler, from what Harry could tell. He was strong, experienced, and specialized in spells that attacked the mind. And he was good at dodging, too, which meant that it was taking Harry longer to bring him down than he’d originally anticipated.

But Harry had rage driving him, and Harry had commitment to stay in this timeline driving him, and Harry had the Elder Wand.

When he asked it to, the Elder Wand guided his hand in a series of patterns that lifted the defenses around his mind, a sort of imitation Occlumency that Harry wished bitterly he’d known about before this. Prince took a moment to notice that most of his curses were now bouncing off, and by the time that he got his balance back, Harry had moved closer and launched a spinning kick from his hip.

Apparently Prince hadn’t expected the fight to get into the realm of the physical. He stumbled back with a gasp, and Harry didn’t connect directly. But his foot did land on top of Prince’s foot, and something cracked.

That made the man drop his guard and bend over, and Harry kicked him in the head next. The Elder Wand blocked a spluttering green spell that wasn’t the Killing Curse from the end of Prince’s wand, and Harry jumped into the air and kicked out with both feet.

It made him land hard, staggering himself and aching for the first time since he’d broken loose of the iron bars, but he had accomplished what he’d wanted to. Prince lay senseless on the floor. Harry smiled grimly to himself, and bent over to ease his panting.

“Harry.”

Harry looked up and into Orion’s face. Orion stood with his hand held out, even though Harry wasn’t sprawled like Prince was. He had a question in his eyes far more profound than whether Harry was hurt, which was the first one Harry had expected him to ask.

And Harry was glad to be able to answer it positively.

He reached out, clasped Orion’s hand, and wrung it, hard, once, before he straightened up and nodded. “I think we’ll have an interesting time questioning them,” he said, glancing at Snape and turning his eyes away. The grimace bothered him, even though he was sure that whatever spell Snape had on him was probably as bad as what he’d planned for Orion.

Orion tilted his face up with a gentle hand. Harry swallowed as he stared him in the eyes. He didn’t want to shake his head, but this silent question, he wasn’t ready for.

Orion seemed to understand that, since he nodded and stepped back. “I think we should go and see what’s become of the Minister and Grindelwald.”

“Good idea,” Harry said, following him out, after casting a few spells to bind Prince and Snape in place, just in case they woke up. He let Orion go in front of him, which had the benefit of guarding him from any danger that might come his way, and an unexpected one, too. He got to watch Orion’s smoothly-moving back muscles, and—

Harry sighed a little. Some questions, he wasn’t ready to ask himself.

*

Albus hadn’t made his decision yet when Izzy abruptly appeared between the firestorm and Gellert. She folded her arms and regarded him pensively.

“Time traveler’s battle is won,” she said. “You just be destroying this one more if you destroy your husband.”

Albus clenched his hand around the Elder Wand. Then he nodded, and banished the firestorm, ignoring the wand’s buzzing discontent.

He looked into Gellert’s eyes, though, and realized that the impression of the firestorm might still have done its work. Gellert had realized that Albus had wanted to kill him, that he probably would have done it if not for a house-elf’s timely intervention. He had to see Albus in a light that Albus didn’t think had ever occurred to him before.

“I’ll be wanting oaths,” Albus said, his voice low enough that no one coming up to them could have heard it.

Gellert swallowed, slowly. His nod was stubborn, delayed, but he made it.

Albus turned away to speak to Harry Potter and Orion Black, who were walking up to him, but he wouldn’t have been able to turn his back at all if it hadn’t been for Izzy’s presence. He wondered if, even with oaths, he would ever again be able to trust the man whose bed and life he had shared.