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lomonaaerenTitle: Half the Sunrise
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Pairing: Harry/Theo, Harry/Ginny, Theo/OFC, mentions of Ron/Hermione
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, graphic violence, gore, minor character death, temporary child death, temporary character death, time travel, discussion of violence and character deaths, angst, grief, Dark Arts, magical bonding
Wordcount: This part
Summary: The magical attack that causes the death of Harry Potter’s best friend and son, and Theodore Nott’s wife, can be repaired with time travel. Harry and Theo enact the ritual, believing their lives are the price—only to find out that this is true in the most twisted of ways. Suddenly trapped in a world where they are the only ones who remember what happened and are no longer recognized by anyone, while replicas of themselves replace them in their lives with their friends and families, Harry and Theo wrestle with being strangers to everyone but each other.
Author’s Notes: This was written for the Quantum Bang, a challenge to write 50,000 words of fix-it fic, and I’m now moving it to my personal fic collections. It is complete, not part of any of my current series, and has 12 chapters. Please do read the warnings.
Chapter One
The front of Quality Quidditch Supplies blew out as they were passing it.
Harry was already moving as the window exploded, raising a shield that spread rippling along the line of his family. Ginny ducked, her arms winding around Jamie and Lily, while Hermione shouted as she raised a shield herself to protect Rose and Hugo—
The explosion spread further, faster, than their shields. Harry, his heart pounding furiously in his ears, spun around in time to see Ron drop with his arms wrapped around Al. Both of them had been lagging at the back of the line, arguing furiously over the new Levinbolt broom as they peered into the window.
Harry knew what would happen as soon as he saw them.
He couldn’t take it in.
He ran towards them, his pulse so fast that it felt as if he was running on top of his heart, and dropped to his knees next to Ron and Al. Ron lay motionless, his head tipped to the side, a jagged shard of glass implanted in his throat. Al lay on top of him, as still, another shard of glass through—
Harry couldn’t take it in.
He cast a diagnostic, then again because his hand was shaking too badly to complete the spell the first time. There was blood on his fingers. He didn’t know where it had come from. He could hear shrieking, screaming, weeping. He didn’t know who was making the sounds.
He stared at the diagnostic that finally rippled into being above Ron’s and Al’s bodies, dark blue letters. The color told him the message before he ever got to read it.
Mortal wounds. Breathing: None. Heartbeats: None.
“Ron,” Hermione breathed as she dropped to her knees beside him. “Ron.” She couldn’t say anything else, and when Harry looked at her, her face was as empty of reflections as the shard of glass jammed into Al.
Harry reached out and caught her hand. He raised another shield, this one to hold back Ginny and his daughter and his older son as they tried to approach the body—
His only son, now.
His own shard of glass felt as if it was jammed through his belly, but Harry kept his voice as calm and steady as possible. They needed him to not break like the window had. He couldn’t, not now. “Call the Aurors!” he roared. “Fetch the Healers!” and heard running footsteps he presumed had gone to do his bidding.
Then he looked back at the bodies, and grief flowed in in an endless tide.
- - - -
“I’m sorry, Auror Potter. They’re gone.”
Harry shut his eyes. It felt as if the ground beneath him had been washed away and he was floating on a deep, dark ocean.
Ginny was home with James and Lily. Hermione was home with Rose and Hugo. They’d both asked him to come to St. Mungo’s and be the one to hear the news, asking without words for him to bear it first.
And Harry was happy to do that. If nothing else, he was the one who had known that Ron and Al were dead the minute he saw them sprawled on the pavement. There was no way that he could fool himself with false hopes.
“All right, Healer,” he whispered, standing up from the chair in the private waiting room they’d given him. He hadn’t wanted that, but it was one of those concessions to his fame that people made anyway. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Mr. Potter, if you need to talk to a Mind-Healer…”
I need it not to have happened!
But that wasn’t something he could yell at a Healer. Harry just nodded and accepted the Floo address and name on a piece of parchment he gave them. Then he took a moment to settle himself, shoulders and magic and aching head and all, before he went home.
He Apparated into the entrance hall and saw Ginny and Hermione immediately coming down the stairs. There was no sign of the kids. Harry hoped that meant they’d been sent to bed.
Harry caught their eyes and slowly shook his head.
Ginny closed her own and stood there with her arms shaking, which progressed to her whole body shaking. Hermione didn’t move, but her face grew whiter and whiter as Harry watched.
Harry went up the steps two at a time to take them in his arms, his wife and his best friend, and hold them while the world crumbled around them.
- - - -
There’d been a thorough investigation done, but it had been unsatisfying more than anything, Harry thought, as he flung the Daily Prophet down. Just two idiot teenagers who had started to duel each other over who would get the last Nimbus 2015 in the shop, and one of their Shattering Curses had hit the window instead of someone else’s bones.
Nothing to prosecute, no Dark wizard to hunt down. Just…stupidity.
Harry glanced again at the paper. They had published the full list of victims, in alphabetical order except for Ron’s and Al’s names at the very top. So many people that Harry hadn’t even realized had died at first, but Diagon Alley had been crowded that day. Elizabeth Nott, Theodore Nott’s wife. Torrance Keller, a second-year Muggleborn on his way to do school shopping. John Dawlish, one of Harry’s fellow Aurors who had been there just to pick up some ink and quills.
Harry shut his eyes and stood there for a long second. He was glad, at the moment, that Hogwarts wouldn’t start for another two months. Maybe Jamie would be all right to go by then, but right now, he needed to be home with his family around him.
Maybe he won’t be.
Harry nodded. All right. He would live with that. They would live with that. Harry had so far spent time with Ginny talking quietly about Al, and conjuring little targets for Jamie to blow up with his wand, and cooking with Lily, because that was what she wanted to do right now.
He spent time with Hermione and the Weasleys, too, but there was more talking there, and yelling. Harry had had to prevent George from hunting down the names of the two teenagers who’d been dueling in Quality Quidditch Supplies, which the papers hadn’t released. He’d held Molly as she cried, and arranged Ron’s funeral with Arthur, and tried his best to explain the deaths to Louis, who was too young to really understand but kept asking questions about them. At least he seemed to understand at the end that Uncle Ron and Cousin Al wouldn’t be coming back anymore, and that was all Harry could hope for.
I’ll have to live with this.
- - - -
Harry couldn’t.
He didn’t know why. He’d never lived through something as bad as this, true, but he’d gone to gather Ginny up and deliver her back to the school right after killing the basilisk and the diary, and he’d only been angry enough to smash up Dumbledore’s office on the actual night of Sirius’s death. He’d endured then. Why couldn’t he endure now?
But somehow, he couldn’t. He kept forgetting that Al wasn’t there anymore and opening his mouth to call him down for dinner, then remembering. He kept thinking of something he needed to tell Ron and then feeling it like a stab in the soul when he remembered he couldn’t.
He began to dream of both Al and Ron being stabbed to death by those pieces of glass, and he woke screaming to the point that he and Ginny had to sleep in separate beds, and Harry had to put Silencing Charms around his own. He couldn’t make things worse for her, but they weren’t getting better for him, either.
Harry drank diluted draughts of Dreamless Sleep Potion when he could, but it couldn’t be taken every day, and it didn’t help with the grief. He spoke to his superiors, and they made sympathetic noises but pushed him to come back to work, talking about all those crimes that only Head Auror Potter could solve. Part of that work was reassigning files and projects that Ron had been working on when he—
Harry had walked out of one meeting like that, and used the Floo address the Healers had given him to set up an appointment with a Mind-Healer.
Except the Mind-Healer was no better. She spoke gently, but firmly, about how Harry wasn’t the only one suffering and he needed to be there for his children and his wife. She pointed out that while Harry was having problems with his job, Ginny had quit hers, as a Quidditch reporter for the Prophet, altogether. She said that James would need more support to begin Hogwarts than Harry was offering him right now.
Harry agreed with her aloud, but he burned with anger both against her and against himself, that he couldn’t snap back from this the way he had so many other things.
He didn’t seek out a Mind-Healing session again.
- - - -
A letter arrived via a barn owl that Harry didn’t recognize one day when he was discussing options for keeping Jamie out of Hogwarts for a year with Ginny. Harry mechanically cast detection charms on it and set it aside. It was probably going to be either something from the Aurors or another meaningless set of condolences, and he had other things to talk about right now.
“I think Jamie needs as much support as possible,” Ginny whispered, dragging her fingers through the ring left by a mug of—something. Soup, Harry thought. He thought they’d had soup for lunch.
“I know,” Harry agreed. That was something they’d both said over and over, and of course it was important. “I just want to figure out what it looks like. He said that he wanted to go to Hogwarts, but then he said he didn’t. Do you think we should try to talk to him about it again?”
“You know that every time we talk to him, he cries.”
Harry closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his hand for a minute. “I know, Gin,” he whispered. “But Hogwarts starts in a fortnight. Should we—we need to talk to him. I don’t want to just make a decision for him that he doesn’t want, but I don’t know what he wants, either.”
“You want to take him away from me?”
Harry started up, because that was a new tone in her voice. He stared blankly at Ginny, who was staring back at him, shivering. Harry had the brief idea that her anger was the only thing propping her up.
“Gin, what—”
“He should stay here,” Ginny snapped, and her face was harsh and unyielding, a stranger’s. “He has to stay here. If I can’t help him, Harry, I don’t know how I’m going to survive myself.”
“But is that best for him?” Harry asked as carefully as he could. “Would he find the most support staying here, or being at Hogwarts?”
“With children who would constantly ask him about the accident, and about Al and his uncle?” Ginny’s shoulders hunched again. “I can’t believe that we’re discussing this. Of course he’ll stay here. I shouldn’t have allowed you to believe that I would ever consent to him going to Hogwarts.”
Harry opened his mouth, then closed it. He thought of what the Mind-Healer had said, about how he wasn’t the only one suffering. Jamie was, too, and Ginny. And Lily. And Hermione, and Rose, and Hugo, and the other Weasleys.
“Of course,” he said quietly. “I’ll owl Minerva and make the arrangements for taking Jamie out of Hogwarts for this year.”
“You do that.”
Ginny stared off at the window at the far end of the kitchen, where Al had liked to sit and eat breakfast while laughing over the pages of some book. He had mostly done it because they had forbidden books at the table—
Harry remembered.
He turned and left the kitchen for the owlery before his magic, which was making the table creak, splintered it.
- - - -
“Auror Potter, got these scrolls for you.”
Harry hid a sigh. Being back at work was horrendous, but so was being at home with Ginny and Jamie and Lily, where he would say the wrong thing no matter what he said. Lily wanted him there but would also cry any time he so much as picked something up, because she could remember Al picking it up, too, and Harry looked so much like Al. Jamie was furious that he wasn’t going to Hogwarts but also didn’t want to go, and he had screamed at Harry until his voice was hoarse. Ginny had turned into someone Harry didn’t recognize, a spun glass statue with only grief to light her up.
They were both saying things they didn’t mean, because somehow cruelty was better than sitting in silence.
Harry took a long, wavering breath, and unrolled the scrolls that Auror Holden had dropped on his desk.
They’d been confiscated from a Dark wizard, Harry reckoned, after he’d read through them a few times. Probably that smuggler of unicorn blood Holden and Gorgeson had finally run to earth in Knockturn Alley. Harry wrinkled his nose at the contents, which were mostly rituals that no one in their right mind would perform, almost all of them involving unicorn body parts. But it was his job as Head Auror to revise them, partially so that they could judge whether their possessors should get the Kiss or Azkaban or some lesser punishment.
Harry paused when he reached the end of the third scroll. The circle there was insanely complex, but the handwriting above it was clear enough, and the list of ingredients didn’t seem to involve unicorn blood.
A ritual to change the course of time.
Harry swallowed. The click of his throat sounded loud to him, and he discovered that he was looking around as though someone would observe him, even though he had a private office. Harry waved his wand to lock the door, cast another charm that would make a memory retrieved from his head for the Pensive look blurry, as though seen underwater, and plunged into the scroll.
The circle was complex, yes, but the scroll also didn’t say that it had to be made of jewels or five different kinds of metal or crushed shells from extinct crabs, the way that some Harry had seen did. It simply said that it had to be drawn, in chalk, on or near the site where the creator wanted to travel back in time, and it required the sacrifice of a life.
Harry felt a sharp smile flicker across his lips. That was no problem. Right now, he didn’t think his life was much worth living anyway. And he was sure that his family could cope with his death better than they could with both Ron’s and Al’s. Until last year, when he’d become Head Auror, they’d had to accept that he had a dangerous job and might die at any time. This would be a continuation of that, not different.
He spread the scroll out, weighted it with the kinds of crystal globes that people thought were good gifts to give him for some reason, took out a fresh piece of parchment of his own, and began to fill it with notes.
- - - -
The more he learned about the ritual, the more Harry felt as though ice had settled into his bones. He lay awake the night after he had finished his notes, arms folded behind his head as he stared out through the window next to their bed. Ginny was already asleep, and Harry would move to the guest bedroom soon, so that his nightmares wouldn’t disturb her. But he had thought it might comfort him to lie next to her for a while, since he would be gone in such a short amount of time.
It didn’t work. Ginny’s body was cold and stiff next to him, as if she was the corpse that Harry planned to become.
Harry breathed out slowly. The ritual notes said that the willing sacrifice of a life was enough to make sure that he could go back any length of time, at least up until a year and a day had passed. He would arrive back in time and make sure that his family and Ron and Hermione’s took another road than the one in front of Quality Quidditch Supplies, by force if necessary.
Then he would fade out of existence, and there would be one corpse left, his, lying on the ground.
Harry closed his eyes. He didn’t want to die. But neither did he want to live without Ron and Al, and it was rapidly becoming clear that no one else did, either. Lily had started asking questions about death that made Harry—more than afraid.
He stretched his hands out in front of him and wondered what it would be like to watch them fade, the way the ritual notes said he would. It would look like that to him, not to anyone else. He would probably die in the same way that the deaths he wanted to prevent had happened, the ritual had suggested. So they would see him pierced with glass and lying there…
Harry shivered. It would be horrible for them, yes. He could acknowledge that. But less horrible than two deaths. Less horrible than the death of a child and the death of someone whom Harry knew, based on Fred’s death, would cope with grief using more grace than Harry could.
I’m so bad at it that I’m practically running away.
Harry glanced over his shoulder and saw Ginny still curled in a tight position. And, come to think of it, her breathing was a little too fast for her to be asleep. Harry sighed and stood up to go to the guest bedroom.
He was terrible at knowing what would comfort his wife and children. That was only one reason among many that it would be better if he went back far enough to prevent them from needing comfort at all.
He was good at saving people, after all.
- - - -
Harry stepped slowly back from the circle he had drawn in chalk on the ground and nodded. It was two in the morning right now, and he was standing in the section of Diagon Alley right in front of Quality Quidditch supplies where the accident had happened. As nearly as he could make out, Harry was on the spot where Ron and Al had died.
Chills crept up his spine. Harry ignored them, his eyes focused on the shop. It had a new window, and Harry turned his head away, fighting the impulse to smash it.
He bent over the chalk circle, checking the placement of the smaller circles along the boundary, but already he knew he had done something correctly. He could feel the sharp nip of a chill wind along his hands and on the side of his neck, which meant magical power was gathering. And he had already written the day and time that he wanted to go back to, an hour before the accident.
“You’re an idiot, Potter.”
Harry leaped and came down still within the circle. He hadn’t damaged it, thank Merlin. The wind continued to bite at him, and a small golden tornado appeared in the center of the circle with him, but Harry couldn’t take his eyes from the cloaked figure who had appeared at the corner of Quality Quidditch Supplies.
At first, Harry thought it might be an Unspeakable. It would be just like one of them to sense the power and come to interrupt him. But then the person pulled his hood back, and Harry recognized the pale face and tumbled dark hair after a moment of squinting.
“…Nott?”
“No other.” Nott strode towards him, but paused outside the smaller chalk circles and looked them over. His eyebrows went up—Harry could see that much by the light of his own wand and the tornado of gathering magic—and he whistled a little under his breath. “I should have known this is what you would make of it.”
Harry snarled softly but said nothing. He didn’t know what Nott was talking about, and he was going to play as dumb as he could until Nott went away. By the time he tried to report to the Ministry that Harry was using Dark Arts, Harry would already be gone, and time would have reversed, and Ron and Al would be safe.
“Did you even have a plan?” Nott asked, straightening up again and raking his gaze over Harry. “Or were you just going to go back in time and die and trust that everything would work out for the best?”
“Better one death than two,” Harry said. He worked hard to make sure that his voice wasn’t breaking apart in front of Nott. He could expose some weakness to an enemy, but this would have been too much. “And Ginny and the rest knew that I might die someday, because of the nature of my job. This will be easier for them to move on from.”
Nott rolled his eyes. “Or you could adopt my solution and have a far-superior result that wouldn’t require them to undergo grief at all. Just you.”
“I could do that if it worked,” Harry said. “But I don’t trust you, Nott, and I don’t trust you if you’re going to actually tell me that you’ve discovered a form of time travel that doesn’t have a price.”
“It does have a price,” Nott said. He walked a little to the side, bringing his face more clearly into Harry’s wand-light, and Harry swallowed at the fanatical gleam in his eyes. “But not a death that would leave your family grieving.”
“And you care about that?”
“The ritual requires too much magic for one wizard to perform alone. I thought if I could get you to do it with me, Potter, we’ll both gain what we want. Your son and friend will be alive.” Nott’s face twisted. “And so will my Elizabeth.”
Harry nodded slowly, remembering her name from the list that had been published in the Prophet. “And they won’t grieve? Why? Will they forget—us?” Odd to have another pronoun to put in place of me.
“In a manner of speaking.” Nott looked up and down the Alley for a moment. “If you’ll erase those circles so that no one gets the wrong idea, and come with me, I believe that you’ll find the scroll I have in my flat interesting.”
Harry glanced down at the circles at his feet, but the golden glow was gone, probably because he hadn’t been focusing on increasing or harnessing it. He swore softly and irritably as he began casting the charm that would erase the chalk lines. “This had better be fucking worth it, Nott.”
“Believe me,” Nott said, and his voice sounded as guttural as if he was speaking through a mouth of rocks, “I wouldn’t bother with it if it wasn’t.”
- - - -
Harry studied the ritual circle sketched on the enormous piece of parchment that Nott had pinned to the wall in his study, walking from point to point in front of it. He could see the similarities with the circle that he had been constructing, but also the differences.
Enough to make hope fill his chest as it hadn’t even when the scroll with the ritual he had been considering had crossed his desk.
He cocked his head towards Nott. “Where did you find it? And why did you know that I was doing something like this tonight?”
“It only now occurred to you to question that?” But Nott’s voice was amused rather than scathing. Not that Harry even knew if he was scathing, really. They’d largely ignored each other at school, having a more neutral relationship than Harry had ever enjoyed with the other Slytherins. Nott leaned his hip on his desk. “But I could feel the power gathering, and I’ve spent long enough immersed in the study of this ritual that I could feel what it would be like. I suspected it was you. You’re the only other one who lost people that day and who would be powerful and desperate enough to try something like this.”
Harry nodded, and his gaze went back to the ritual. “It takes our lives in a different way,” he murmured.
Nott nodded back. “We sacrifice our connections to other people and our places in their hearts, for the privilege of saving them. And, if I’m right…” He crossed the room to stand at Harry’s side, tapping his wand up and down a section of the parchment and making it flash with blue light. “It also creates copies of us that blend seamlessly into our lives. There’ll be no reason for Elizabeth to mourn. Or your Weasleys, either,” he added, after a moment.
“But won’t they notice that there’s two of us running around?”
Nott shook his head. “Not if I’m right.”
“If you’re right.”
Nott ignored that. “They’ll be able to see us and interact with us, and so will other people. But no one will react to us the way they would to Harry Potter and Theodore Nott. At most, if you struck up a friendship with, say, Weasley, he might think it’s a little strange that he has two friends named Harry.” Nott turned his head, and Harry saw the glitter of his eyes from close. Yes, Nott was as determined as Harry was to travel back and save them. “We’ll be on our own, and we won’t be able to slip back into the places we held or make anyone remember us. We won’t have anything except the clothes on our backs, the wands in our holsters, and whatever else we bring with us. No Gringotts accounts, no homes, nothing but our own memories for satisfaction.”
“I don’t give a shit about those things.”
“Neither do I.”
“No offense, Nott, but why?”
Nott offered him a smile that was ghastly enough to make Harry flinch away from it. “Why am I doing this when I’m a spoiled little rich pureblood Death Eater’s son? How can I not care about the big vaults and the mounds of Galleons and the grand house I’m losing?”
“Yes.” Harry lifted his chin and refused to flinch away. If he was going to do something as mental as this, he did have to understand where Nott was coming from.
Nott nodded and slowly turned back to face the parchment on the wall. His eyes went so vacant that Harry had to control the temptation to flinch.
“All my life,” Nott said softly, “I didn’t care about anything very much. I didn’t want to be a Death Eater, but that’s because it looked like it involved pain and obedience, neither of which appealed to me. Not because I had an attack of morality. Not because I was an especially good person. I assumed it would be the same thing when I got married and had children. I wouldn’t feel much for them. I would get a kind of distant affection, maybe, the kind that I had for my father.
“And then somehow, Elizabeth broke through that.” Nott drew a shuddering breath. “She saw that I could become someone better, and she reached out to that potential man within me and drew him to the surface. Suddenly I found that I cared about someone, and it was—it felt good, to not be alone in the center of my universe.” Nott shivered and closed his eyes. “I didn’t even want to have children with her right away, because I was afraid of how they would alter the balance between us. And she was content to wait. We were all in all to each other.”
His voice died into silence. Harry didn’t know what it would be like to experience that, but he could imagine, he thought, just from the pressure of Nott’s words. He reached out, hesitantly, and placed his hand on Nott’s arm.
Nott started and turned to stare at him. Harry cleared his throat and looked back at the parchment. “You didn’t answer my question about where you found this ritual.”
“In the same place you found yours, I imagine.”
“What?” Harry turned back with narrowed eyes. The smugness in Nott’s voice was unmistakable.
“The same treasure trove of scrolls from the unicorn smugglers?” Nott gave a vicious grin that made Harry glad they were working together in this. “I got there before your Aurors did. I’d cast a Seeking Spell that would lead me to something that might allow me to undo Elizabeth’s death. I had the time to see the ritual scroll that you must have looked at, but I could tell that it wasn’t powerful enough to be what I wanted. I don’t desire Elizabeth to suffer a moment’s grief. I took mine, and I was fairly sure that the other one would cross your desk and attract your attention.”
“You planned for me to be involved in this?”
“I thought it likely. I didn’t know for sure that it would happen. But when I felt the magic gathering in Diagon Alley tonight, I knew.”
Harry nodded slowly. “And you think our combined magic will be enough to do this one?” He stared again at the insanely complicated circle on the parchment. It was really a series of circles, one which made the small series of different ones he’d drawn in Diagon Alley look like a child’s toys.
A child. Al. Jamie. Lily.
Harry breathed out shakily. He would be leaving them behind, losing all connection with them. But that was better than leaving them to suffer the way they were now.
“Your strength and mine? Your uncommitted magic to my Dark?” Nott nodded so slowly that Harry could only make it out by the way that the outline of the desk disappeared behind the line of his neck. “Oh, yes, Potter. Yes, indeed.”
Harry nodded back.
- - - -
It took longer to arrange matters for Nott’s ritual than it had for Harry’s. Harry had to become used to the drawing of the complex circles, and he had to buy half of the crushed opals that the outermost oval would be made of. He had to hide things from Ginny and Hermione and Jamie and Lily and the others.
Hermione was waking up enough from her numb grief to question him about how he was doing. In fact, Rose and Hugo seemed to be recovering faster and better from the loss of their father than Jamie and Lily were from the loss of their brother.
Harry took the point. He should have been able to give his children as much peace as Hermione was giving hers, but he couldn’t. Which meant he was beyond a failure as a father.
But not as a savior. He had died and come back. He could do the same thing again, with the dying only being metaphorical and emotional.
It would hurt to watch Hermione frown questioningly at a different version of Harry Potter, and Ginny and the children love him, and Ron laugh and put his arm around his shoulders. But what did that matter? Ron and Al would be alive to do it, and the others wouldn’t suffer a second of debilitating grief. They wouldn’t even remember it. Harry and Nott would be the only ones who did.
So Harry evaded Hermione’s questions, and haunted Knockturn Alley to buy the crushed opals and snake scales they needed, and closely read the books Nott lent him on what he could do to help the ritual as a Parselmouth, and impatiently awaited the full moon they had decided on for the casting of the ritual.
- - - -
Harry stood impatiently next to Nott on one end of meadow near Nott’s manor that they had chosen. This particular ritual didn’t have to be conducted in the middle of Diagon Alley, which by itself would have made it superior as far as Harry was concerned. But it did have to be at night, and the only light that shone down at the moment was that of the full moon, ascended nearly as high as it would get, and the light of their sparkling candles, fixed in the earth at either end of the space that the oval would occupy.
Harry’s whole being was fixed on Nott, even the thoughts of resurrecting his loved ones and easing their grief driven to the back of his mind. He saw the moment when Nott inclined his head perfectly.
Harry lifted his wand and cried, “Inicio!”
The magic snapped out of him, not a specific spell but an intent-directed invocation, and seized the crushed opal dust. Nott had cast at the exact same time, and the sparkling motes whirled and began to dance into place, laying out the huge oval that would contain the inner circles, over such an expanse of grass that they would take ten minutes to cover.
Harry didn’t need to pay attention to the opal dust from now on, as the magic kept flowing by itself and steadily draining from both him and Nott. He glanced at the second bag by his feet, that of shed scales from thirteen different kinds of snakes, and hissed, “Begin as I command you.”
The bag tore open, the gathering, heavy magic in the air doing it of its own will, and the scales spilled out.
“Boomslang,” Harry called. The dark green scales whirled away and moved into position, creating the first of the thirteen inner circles inside the oval. Nott stood by, watching quietly. He couldn’t help since he wasn’t a Parselmouth, but he would be the one making sure there were no disruptions and lending the bulk of the passive magical support for this next ten minutes while Harry did the active one.
“Black mamba.”
Dark shed scales joined the green ones, and Harry heard a voice hissing softly, not speaking words but simply imprinting the sound of the deadly snake’s voice into the ritual. He kept from sighing with an effort. It was working.
“King cobra.”
As another set of scales moved and poured into position, Harry critically examined the circles that the boomslang and mamba scales were constructing. They needed to be perfectly circular and to span the exact same amount of space, with a thin thread of grass between them, and their outer edges touching the oval at top and bottom. In addition, the circle of boomslang scales needed to rest against the nearer side of the oval, which the opal flakes had luckily already put in place.
“Banded krait.”
Nott made a swift gesture. Harry looked at him, but he gave a reassuring nod, and Harry returned to what he was doing, deciding that whatever minor magical fluctuation Nott had sensed had been handled.
“Fer-de-lance.”
On and on it went, the chant of serpentine names, the pour of serpentine scales, and the falling-into-place of the opal flakes. Already, Harry could see the gathering flashes of red and green and blue and purple above them, and only didn’t nod in satisfaction because it might disrupt his incanting. That was why opal flakes were necessary for this ritual, because they were the most changeable of gems and wielded the power to change time itself, if used properly.
The last circle of scales, that of the blue krait, settled against the far side of the oval, the one near Nott. Harry drew in a hoarse, whistling breath. Savage magical exhaustion dragged at him; he could feel his lungs laboring.
But he couldn’t lie down yet. And his determination when he remembered Ginny’s face, Hermione’s, Lily’s and Jamie’s and Rose’s and Hugo’s and Molly’s, drove him on.
He reached out and laid his right hand over his left wrist. He could see Nott clasping his right wrist with his left hand on the far side of the oval. Harry nodded and focused on the sides of the oval.
The magic was rising, but so thickly that it seemed sluggish, without any outwards manifestation as yet. Harry leaned forwards slightly, focusing on the oval and the circles of snake scales, chanting softly under his breath. Nott had said that the ritual didn’t care what they chanted at that point, so Harry simply recited the names of the snakes whose scales he had used in the center circles. The important point was to stay focused, so that the magic could act through them and manifest—
There.
The snap of golden light along his side of the oval was matched by a heavy surge of dark green along Nott’s side. And then the manifestations Harry had been told about appeared. A hippogriff made of shining yellow light paced along the oval next to him, a slow, measured walk, while an emerald dragon flew above it on Nott’s side.
Harry met Nott’s eyes. They were shining with feverish excitement. Harry nodded, and clamped his fingers down on his left wrist. If they had done it right—
They had. His fingers parted the skin of his left wrist as though they were made of steel. The blood sprang forth, and Harry directed it to drip carefully on the opal flakes and the pacing hippogriff image. Nott would be doing the same with the dragon on the other side.
At the first fleck of blood, the hippogriff halted, wings fanning back. It turned to glance at Harry, and there was something sharper than the blades that had parted his skin in those eyes. It prowled towards him without leaving the oval, “skin” of light bulging and rippling. Something was breaking through.
Harry kept his eyes on the hippogriff, and the way that murky tentacles spread out from it, and scales coiled and danced into the air, as if he were looking at a segment of a snake without an end. Noting mattered except that he stand firm.
“What is your desire?”
Two voices spoke at once, one from the transforming hippogriff and one from whatever the dragon had become on Nott’s end, in perfect harmony. Harry felt his ears begin to bleed from the effort of hearing it.
He ignored that. He spoke at the exact same time with Nott, something they’d practiced until it came naturally. “To return to two minutes before noon on the fifteenth of July, 2015, in Diagon Alley.” The accident had happened at two minutes before one.
“What is your second desire?”
“To keep our memories intact,” Harry chanted in time with Nott, “and know exactly what we must do to stop the accident from killing our loved ones.”
“What is your third desire?”
“That the intent of the ritual be fulfilled,” Harry and Nott said in time, “with our connections to others as the price, and exact replicas of ourselves be created to take our places in our loved ones’ lives, leaving us alone as the only ones who remember the past.”
The images pacing the oval, which now looked nothing like the hippogriff and dragon that had technically birthed them, stopped and pulsed in silence. Harry struggled to avoid looking at Nott. In the end, these Dark creatures had to be the ones to accept the price and grant what they’d asked for, or not. As far as Harry could tell, they’d done everything perfectly up until this point. They just had to wait.
“Granted.”
Harry felt the iron grip of the magic that had been hovering above the ritual space, and held his breath to avoid screaming. It felt as if pincers were grabbing his chest, twisting, and wrenching him through space—
Nott screamed, and the world seemed to spin sideways into a long, slanting corridor of black light. Harry dived down it, and on the other end of the tunnel were light and stone, growing nearer and nearer.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Pairing: Harry/Theo, Harry/Ginny, Theo/OFC, mentions of Ron/Hermione
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, graphic violence, gore, minor character death, temporary child death, temporary character death, time travel, discussion of violence and character deaths, angst, grief, Dark Arts, magical bonding
Wordcount: This part
Summary: The magical attack that causes the death of Harry Potter’s best friend and son, and Theodore Nott’s wife, can be repaired with time travel. Harry and Theo enact the ritual, believing their lives are the price—only to find out that this is true in the most twisted of ways. Suddenly trapped in a world where they are the only ones who remember what happened and are no longer recognized by anyone, while replicas of themselves replace them in their lives with their friends and families, Harry and Theo wrestle with being strangers to everyone but each other.
Author’s Notes: This was written for the Quantum Bang, a challenge to write 50,000 words of fix-it fic, and I’m now moving it to my personal fic collections. It is complete, not part of any of my current series, and has 12 chapters. Please do read the warnings.
Chapter One
The front of Quality Quidditch Supplies blew out as they were passing it.
Harry was already moving as the window exploded, raising a shield that spread rippling along the line of his family. Ginny ducked, her arms winding around Jamie and Lily, while Hermione shouted as she raised a shield herself to protect Rose and Hugo—
The explosion spread further, faster, than their shields. Harry, his heart pounding furiously in his ears, spun around in time to see Ron drop with his arms wrapped around Al. Both of them had been lagging at the back of the line, arguing furiously over the new Levinbolt broom as they peered into the window.
Harry knew what would happen as soon as he saw them.
He couldn’t take it in.
He ran towards them, his pulse so fast that it felt as if he was running on top of his heart, and dropped to his knees next to Ron and Al. Ron lay motionless, his head tipped to the side, a jagged shard of glass implanted in his throat. Al lay on top of him, as still, another shard of glass through—
Harry couldn’t take it in.
He cast a diagnostic, then again because his hand was shaking too badly to complete the spell the first time. There was blood on his fingers. He didn’t know where it had come from. He could hear shrieking, screaming, weeping. He didn’t know who was making the sounds.
He stared at the diagnostic that finally rippled into being above Ron’s and Al’s bodies, dark blue letters. The color told him the message before he ever got to read it.
Mortal wounds. Breathing: None. Heartbeats: None.
“Ron,” Hermione breathed as she dropped to her knees beside him. “Ron.” She couldn’t say anything else, and when Harry looked at her, her face was as empty of reflections as the shard of glass jammed into Al.
Harry reached out and caught her hand. He raised another shield, this one to hold back Ginny and his daughter and his older son as they tried to approach the body—
His only son, now.
His own shard of glass felt as if it was jammed through his belly, but Harry kept his voice as calm and steady as possible. They needed him to not break like the window had. He couldn’t, not now. “Call the Aurors!” he roared. “Fetch the Healers!” and heard running footsteps he presumed had gone to do his bidding.
Then he looked back at the bodies, and grief flowed in in an endless tide.
- - - -
“I’m sorry, Auror Potter. They’re gone.”
Harry shut his eyes. It felt as if the ground beneath him had been washed away and he was floating on a deep, dark ocean.
Ginny was home with James and Lily. Hermione was home with Rose and Hugo. They’d both asked him to come to St. Mungo’s and be the one to hear the news, asking without words for him to bear it first.
And Harry was happy to do that. If nothing else, he was the one who had known that Ron and Al were dead the minute he saw them sprawled on the pavement. There was no way that he could fool himself with false hopes.
“All right, Healer,” he whispered, standing up from the chair in the private waiting room they’d given him. He hadn’t wanted that, but it was one of those concessions to his fame that people made anyway. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Mr. Potter, if you need to talk to a Mind-Healer…”
I need it not to have happened!
But that wasn’t something he could yell at a Healer. Harry just nodded and accepted the Floo address and name on a piece of parchment he gave them. Then he took a moment to settle himself, shoulders and magic and aching head and all, before he went home.
He Apparated into the entrance hall and saw Ginny and Hermione immediately coming down the stairs. There was no sign of the kids. Harry hoped that meant they’d been sent to bed.
Harry caught their eyes and slowly shook his head.
Ginny closed her own and stood there with her arms shaking, which progressed to her whole body shaking. Hermione didn’t move, but her face grew whiter and whiter as Harry watched.
Harry went up the steps two at a time to take them in his arms, his wife and his best friend, and hold them while the world crumbled around them.
- - - -
There’d been a thorough investigation done, but it had been unsatisfying more than anything, Harry thought, as he flung the Daily Prophet down. Just two idiot teenagers who had started to duel each other over who would get the last Nimbus 2015 in the shop, and one of their Shattering Curses had hit the window instead of someone else’s bones.
Nothing to prosecute, no Dark wizard to hunt down. Just…stupidity.
Harry glanced again at the paper. They had published the full list of victims, in alphabetical order except for Ron’s and Al’s names at the very top. So many people that Harry hadn’t even realized had died at first, but Diagon Alley had been crowded that day. Elizabeth Nott, Theodore Nott’s wife. Torrance Keller, a second-year Muggleborn on his way to do school shopping. John Dawlish, one of Harry’s fellow Aurors who had been there just to pick up some ink and quills.
Harry shut his eyes and stood there for a long second. He was glad, at the moment, that Hogwarts wouldn’t start for another two months. Maybe Jamie would be all right to go by then, but right now, he needed to be home with his family around him.
Maybe he won’t be.
Harry nodded. All right. He would live with that. They would live with that. Harry had so far spent time with Ginny talking quietly about Al, and conjuring little targets for Jamie to blow up with his wand, and cooking with Lily, because that was what she wanted to do right now.
He spent time with Hermione and the Weasleys, too, but there was more talking there, and yelling. Harry had had to prevent George from hunting down the names of the two teenagers who’d been dueling in Quality Quidditch Supplies, which the papers hadn’t released. He’d held Molly as she cried, and arranged Ron’s funeral with Arthur, and tried his best to explain the deaths to Louis, who was too young to really understand but kept asking questions about them. At least he seemed to understand at the end that Uncle Ron and Cousin Al wouldn’t be coming back anymore, and that was all Harry could hope for.
I’ll have to live with this.
- - - -
Harry couldn’t.
He didn’t know why. He’d never lived through something as bad as this, true, but he’d gone to gather Ginny up and deliver her back to the school right after killing the basilisk and the diary, and he’d only been angry enough to smash up Dumbledore’s office on the actual night of Sirius’s death. He’d endured then. Why couldn’t he endure now?
But somehow, he couldn’t. He kept forgetting that Al wasn’t there anymore and opening his mouth to call him down for dinner, then remembering. He kept thinking of something he needed to tell Ron and then feeling it like a stab in the soul when he remembered he couldn’t.
He began to dream of both Al and Ron being stabbed to death by those pieces of glass, and he woke screaming to the point that he and Ginny had to sleep in separate beds, and Harry had to put Silencing Charms around his own. He couldn’t make things worse for her, but they weren’t getting better for him, either.
Harry drank diluted draughts of Dreamless Sleep Potion when he could, but it couldn’t be taken every day, and it didn’t help with the grief. He spoke to his superiors, and they made sympathetic noises but pushed him to come back to work, talking about all those crimes that only Head Auror Potter could solve. Part of that work was reassigning files and projects that Ron had been working on when he—
Harry had walked out of one meeting like that, and used the Floo address the Healers had given him to set up an appointment with a Mind-Healer.
Except the Mind-Healer was no better. She spoke gently, but firmly, about how Harry wasn’t the only one suffering and he needed to be there for his children and his wife. She pointed out that while Harry was having problems with his job, Ginny had quit hers, as a Quidditch reporter for the Prophet, altogether. She said that James would need more support to begin Hogwarts than Harry was offering him right now.
Harry agreed with her aloud, but he burned with anger both against her and against himself, that he couldn’t snap back from this the way he had so many other things.
He didn’t seek out a Mind-Healing session again.
- - - -
A letter arrived via a barn owl that Harry didn’t recognize one day when he was discussing options for keeping Jamie out of Hogwarts for a year with Ginny. Harry mechanically cast detection charms on it and set it aside. It was probably going to be either something from the Aurors or another meaningless set of condolences, and he had other things to talk about right now.
“I think Jamie needs as much support as possible,” Ginny whispered, dragging her fingers through the ring left by a mug of—something. Soup, Harry thought. He thought they’d had soup for lunch.
“I know,” Harry agreed. That was something they’d both said over and over, and of course it was important. “I just want to figure out what it looks like. He said that he wanted to go to Hogwarts, but then he said he didn’t. Do you think we should try to talk to him about it again?”
“You know that every time we talk to him, he cries.”
Harry closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his hand for a minute. “I know, Gin,” he whispered. “But Hogwarts starts in a fortnight. Should we—we need to talk to him. I don’t want to just make a decision for him that he doesn’t want, but I don’t know what he wants, either.”
“You want to take him away from me?”
Harry started up, because that was a new tone in her voice. He stared blankly at Ginny, who was staring back at him, shivering. Harry had the brief idea that her anger was the only thing propping her up.
“Gin, what—”
“He should stay here,” Ginny snapped, and her face was harsh and unyielding, a stranger’s. “He has to stay here. If I can’t help him, Harry, I don’t know how I’m going to survive myself.”
“But is that best for him?” Harry asked as carefully as he could. “Would he find the most support staying here, or being at Hogwarts?”
“With children who would constantly ask him about the accident, and about Al and his uncle?” Ginny’s shoulders hunched again. “I can’t believe that we’re discussing this. Of course he’ll stay here. I shouldn’t have allowed you to believe that I would ever consent to him going to Hogwarts.”
Harry opened his mouth, then closed it. He thought of what the Mind-Healer had said, about how he wasn’t the only one suffering. Jamie was, too, and Ginny. And Lily. And Hermione, and Rose, and Hugo, and the other Weasleys.
“Of course,” he said quietly. “I’ll owl Minerva and make the arrangements for taking Jamie out of Hogwarts for this year.”
“You do that.”
Ginny stared off at the window at the far end of the kitchen, where Al had liked to sit and eat breakfast while laughing over the pages of some book. He had mostly done it because they had forbidden books at the table—
Harry remembered.
He turned and left the kitchen for the owlery before his magic, which was making the table creak, splintered it.
- - - -
“Auror Potter, got these scrolls for you.”
Harry hid a sigh. Being back at work was horrendous, but so was being at home with Ginny and Jamie and Lily, where he would say the wrong thing no matter what he said. Lily wanted him there but would also cry any time he so much as picked something up, because she could remember Al picking it up, too, and Harry looked so much like Al. Jamie was furious that he wasn’t going to Hogwarts but also didn’t want to go, and he had screamed at Harry until his voice was hoarse. Ginny had turned into someone Harry didn’t recognize, a spun glass statue with only grief to light her up.
They were both saying things they didn’t mean, because somehow cruelty was better than sitting in silence.
Harry took a long, wavering breath, and unrolled the scrolls that Auror Holden had dropped on his desk.
They’d been confiscated from a Dark wizard, Harry reckoned, after he’d read through them a few times. Probably that smuggler of unicorn blood Holden and Gorgeson had finally run to earth in Knockturn Alley. Harry wrinkled his nose at the contents, which were mostly rituals that no one in their right mind would perform, almost all of them involving unicorn body parts. But it was his job as Head Auror to revise them, partially so that they could judge whether their possessors should get the Kiss or Azkaban or some lesser punishment.
Harry paused when he reached the end of the third scroll. The circle there was insanely complex, but the handwriting above it was clear enough, and the list of ingredients didn’t seem to involve unicorn blood.
A ritual to change the course of time.
Harry swallowed. The click of his throat sounded loud to him, and he discovered that he was looking around as though someone would observe him, even though he had a private office. Harry waved his wand to lock the door, cast another charm that would make a memory retrieved from his head for the Pensive look blurry, as though seen underwater, and plunged into the scroll.
The circle was complex, yes, but the scroll also didn’t say that it had to be made of jewels or five different kinds of metal or crushed shells from extinct crabs, the way that some Harry had seen did. It simply said that it had to be drawn, in chalk, on or near the site where the creator wanted to travel back in time, and it required the sacrifice of a life.
Harry felt a sharp smile flicker across his lips. That was no problem. Right now, he didn’t think his life was much worth living anyway. And he was sure that his family could cope with his death better than they could with both Ron’s and Al’s. Until last year, when he’d become Head Auror, they’d had to accept that he had a dangerous job and might die at any time. This would be a continuation of that, not different.
He spread the scroll out, weighted it with the kinds of crystal globes that people thought were good gifts to give him for some reason, took out a fresh piece of parchment of his own, and began to fill it with notes.
- - - -
The more he learned about the ritual, the more Harry felt as though ice had settled into his bones. He lay awake the night after he had finished his notes, arms folded behind his head as he stared out through the window next to their bed. Ginny was already asleep, and Harry would move to the guest bedroom soon, so that his nightmares wouldn’t disturb her. But he had thought it might comfort him to lie next to her for a while, since he would be gone in such a short amount of time.
It didn’t work. Ginny’s body was cold and stiff next to him, as if she was the corpse that Harry planned to become.
Harry breathed out slowly. The ritual notes said that the willing sacrifice of a life was enough to make sure that he could go back any length of time, at least up until a year and a day had passed. He would arrive back in time and make sure that his family and Ron and Hermione’s took another road than the one in front of Quality Quidditch Supplies, by force if necessary.
Then he would fade out of existence, and there would be one corpse left, his, lying on the ground.
Harry closed his eyes. He didn’t want to die. But neither did he want to live without Ron and Al, and it was rapidly becoming clear that no one else did, either. Lily had started asking questions about death that made Harry—more than afraid.
He stretched his hands out in front of him and wondered what it would be like to watch them fade, the way the ritual notes said he would. It would look like that to him, not to anyone else. He would probably die in the same way that the deaths he wanted to prevent had happened, the ritual had suggested. So they would see him pierced with glass and lying there…
Harry shivered. It would be horrible for them, yes. He could acknowledge that. But less horrible than two deaths. Less horrible than the death of a child and the death of someone whom Harry knew, based on Fred’s death, would cope with grief using more grace than Harry could.
I’m so bad at it that I’m practically running away.
Harry glanced over his shoulder and saw Ginny still curled in a tight position. And, come to think of it, her breathing was a little too fast for her to be asleep. Harry sighed and stood up to go to the guest bedroom.
He was terrible at knowing what would comfort his wife and children. That was only one reason among many that it would be better if he went back far enough to prevent them from needing comfort at all.
He was good at saving people, after all.
- - - -
Harry stepped slowly back from the circle he had drawn in chalk on the ground and nodded. It was two in the morning right now, and he was standing in the section of Diagon Alley right in front of Quality Quidditch supplies where the accident had happened. As nearly as he could make out, Harry was on the spot where Ron and Al had died.
Chills crept up his spine. Harry ignored them, his eyes focused on the shop. It had a new window, and Harry turned his head away, fighting the impulse to smash it.
He bent over the chalk circle, checking the placement of the smaller circles along the boundary, but already he knew he had done something correctly. He could feel the sharp nip of a chill wind along his hands and on the side of his neck, which meant magical power was gathering. And he had already written the day and time that he wanted to go back to, an hour before the accident.
“You’re an idiot, Potter.”
Harry leaped and came down still within the circle. He hadn’t damaged it, thank Merlin. The wind continued to bite at him, and a small golden tornado appeared in the center of the circle with him, but Harry couldn’t take his eyes from the cloaked figure who had appeared at the corner of Quality Quidditch Supplies.
At first, Harry thought it might be an Unspeakable. It would be just like one of them to sense the power and come to interrupt him. But then the person pulled his hood back, and Harry recognized the pale face and tumbled dark hair after a moment of squinting.
“…Nott?”
“No other.” Nott strode towards him, but paused outside the smaller chalk circles and looked them over. His eyebrows went up—Harry could see that much by the light of his own wand and the tornado of gathering magic—and he whistled a little under his breath. “I should have known this is what you would make of it.”
Harry snarled softly but said nothing. He didn’t know what Nott was talking about, and he was going to play as dumb as he could until Nott went away. By the time he tried to report to the Ministry that Harry was using Dark Arts, Harry would already be gone, and time would have reversed, and Ron and Al would be safe.
“Did you even have a plan?” Nott asked, straightening up again and raking his gaze over Harry. “Or were you just going to go back in time and die and trust that everything would work out for the best?”
“Better one death than two,” Harry said. He worked hard to make sure that his voice wasn’t breaking apart in front of Nott. He could expose some weakness to an enemy, but this would have been too much. “And Ginny and the rest knew that I might die someday, because of the nature of my job. This will be easier for them to move on from.”
Nott rolled his eyes. “Or you could adopt my solution and have a far-superior result that wouldn’t require them to undergo grief at all. Just you.”
“I could do that if it worked,” Harry said. “But I don’t trust you, Nott, and I don’t trust you if you’re going to actually tell me that you’ve discovered a form of time travel that doesn’t have a price.”
“It does have a price,” Nott said. He walked a little to the side, bringing his face more clearly into Harry’s wand-light, and Harry swallowed at the fanatical gleam in his eyes. “But not a death that would leave your family grieving.”
“And you care about that?”
“The ritual requires too much magic for one wizard to perform alone. I thought if I could get you to do it with me, Potter, we’ll both gain what we want. Your son and friend will be alive.” Nott’s face twisted. “And so will my Elizabeth.”
Harry nodded slowly, remembering her name from the list that had been published in the Prophet. “And they won’t grieve? Why? Will they forget—us?” Odd to have another pronoun to put in place of me.
“In a manner of speaking.” Nott looked up and down the Alley for a moment. “If you’ll erase those circles so that no one gets the wrong idea, and come with me, I believe that you’ll find the scroll I have in my flat interesting.”
Harry glanced down at the circles at his feet, but the golden glow was gone, probably because he hadn’t been focusing on increasing or harnessing it. He swore softly and irritably as he began casting the charm that would erase the chalk lines. “This had better be fucking worth it, Nott.”
“Believe me,” Nott said, and his voice sounded as guttural as if he was speaking through a mouth of rocks, “I wouldn’t bother with it if it wasn’t.”
- - - -
Harry studied the ritual circle sketched on the enormous piece of parchment that Nott had pinned to the wall in his study, walking from point to point in front of it. He could see the similarities with the circle that he had been constructing, but also the differences.
Enough to make hope fill his chest as it hadn’t even when the scroll with the ritual he had been considering had crossed his desk.
He cocked his head towards Nott. “Where did you find it? And why did you know that I was doing something like this tonight?”
“It only now occurred to you to question that?” But Nott’s voice was amused rather than scathing. Not that Harry even knew if he was scathing, really. They’d largely ignored each other at school, having a more neutral relationship than Harry had ever enjoyed with the other Slytherins. Nott leaned his hip on his desk. “But I could feel the power gathering, and I’ve spent long enough immersed in the study of this ritual that I could feel what it would be like. I suspected it was you. You’re the only other one who lost people that day and who would be powerful and desperate enough to try something like this.”
Harry nodded, and his gaze went back to the ritual. “It takes our lives in a different way,” he murmured.
Nott nodded back. “We sacrifice our connections to other people and our places in their hearts, for the privilege of saving them. And, if I’m right…” He crossed the room to stand at Harry’s side, tapping his wand up and down a section of the parchment and making it flash with blue light. “It also creates copies of us that blend seamlessly into our lives. There’ll be no reason for Elizabeth to mourn. Or your Weasleys, either,” he added, after a moment.
“But won’t they notice that there’s two of us running around?”
Nott shook his head. “Not if I’m right.”
“If you’re right.”
Nott ignored that. “They’ll be able to see us and interact with us, and so will other people. But no one will react to us the way they would to Harry Potter and Theodore Nott. At most, if you struck up a friendship with, say, Weasley, he might think it’s a little strange that he has two friends named Harry.” Nott turned his head, and Harry saw the glitter of his eyes from close. Yes, Nott was as determined as Harry was to travel back and save them. “We’ll be on our own, and we won’t be able to slip back into the places we held or make anyone remember us. We won’t have anything except the clothes on our backs, the wands in our holsters, and whatever else we bring with us. No Gringotts accounts, no homes, nothing but our own memories for satisfaction.”
“I don’t give a shit about those things.”
“Neither do I.”
“No offense, Nott, but why?”
Nott offered him a smile that was ghastly enough to make Harry flinch away from it. “Why am I doing this when I’m a spoiled little rich pureblood Death Eater’s son? How can I not care about the big vaults and the mounds of Galleons and the grand house I’m losing?”
“Yes.” Harry lifted his chin and refused to flinch away. If he was going to do something as mental as this, he did have to understand where Nott was coming from.
Nott nodded and slowly turned back to face the parchment on the wall. His eyes went so vacant that Harry had to control the temptation to flinch.
“All my life,” Nott said softly, “I didn’t care about anything very much. I didn’t want to be a Death Eater, but that’s because it looked like it involved pain and obedience, neither of which appealed to me. Not because I had an attack of morality. Not because I was an especially good person. I assumed it would be the same thing when I got married and had children. I wouldn’t feel much for them. I would get a kind of distant affection, maybe, the kind that I had for my father.
“And then somehow, Elizabeth broke through that.” Nott drew a shuddering breath. “She saw that I could become someone better, and she reached out to that potential man within me and drew him to the surface. Suddenly I found that I cared about someone, and it was—it felt good, to not be alone in the center of my universe.” Nott shivered and closed his eyes. “I didn’t even want to have children with her right away, because I was afraid of how they would alter the balance between us. And she was content to wait. We were all in all to each other.”
His voice died into silence. Harry didn’t know what it would be like to experience that, but he could imagine, he thought, just from the pressure of Nott’s words. He reached out, hesitantly, and placed his hand on Nott’s arm.
Nott started and turned to stare at him. Harry cleared his throat and looked back at the parchment. “You didn’t answer my question about where you found this ritual.”
“In the same place you found yours, I imagine.”
“What?” Harry turned back with narrowed eyes. The smugness in Nott’s voice was unmistakable.
“The same treasure trove of scrolls from the unicorn smugglers?” Nott gave a vicious grin that made Harry glad they were working together in this. “I got there before your Aurors did. I’d cast a Seeking Spell that would lead me to something that might allow me to undo Elizabeth’s death. I had the time to see the ritual scroll that you must have looked at, but I could tell that it wasn’t powerful enough to be what I wanted. I don’t desire Elizabeth to suffer a moment’s grief. I took mine, and I was fairly sure that the other one would cross your desk and attract your attention.”
“You planned for me to be involved in this?”
“I thought it likely. I didn’t know for sure that it would happen. But when I felt the magic gathering in Diagon Alley tonight, I knew.”
Harry nodded slowly. “And you think our combined magic will be enough to do this one?” He stared again at the insanely complicated circle on the parchment. It was really a series of circles, one which made the small series of different ones he’d drawn in Diagon Alley look like a child’s toys.
A child. Al. Jamie. Lily.
Harry breathed out shakily. He would be leaving them behind, losing all connection with them. But that was better than leaving them to suffer the way they were now.
“Your strength and mine? Your uncommitted magic to my Dark?” Nott nodded so slowly that Harry could only make it out by the way that the outline of the desk disappeared behind the line of his neck. “Oh, yes, Potter. Yes, indeed.”
Harry nodded back.
- - - -
It took longer to arrange matters for Nott’s ritual than it had for Harry’s. Harry had to become used to the drawing of the complex circles, and he had to buy half of the crushed opals that the outermost oval would be made of. He had to hide things from Ginny and Hermione and Jamie and Lily and the others.
Hermione was waking up enough from her numb grief to question him about how he was doing. In fact, Rose and Hugo seemed to be recovering faster and better from the loss of their father than Jamie and Lily were from the loss of their brother.
Harry took the point. He should have been able to give his children as much peace as Hermione was giving hers, but he couldn’t. Which meant he was beyond a failure as a father.
But not as a savior. He had died and come back. He could do the same thing again, with the dying only being metaphorical and emotional.
It would hurt to watch Hermione frown questioningly at a different version of Harry Potter, and Ginny and the children love him, and Ron laugh and put his arm around his shoulders. But what did that matter? Ron and Al would be alive to do it, and the others wouldn’t suffer a second of debilitating grief. They wouldn’t even remember it. Harry and Nott would be the only ones who did.
So Harry evaded Hermione’s questions, and haunted Knockturn Alley to buy the crushed opals and snake scales they needed, and closely read the books Nott lent him on what he could do to help the ritual as a Parselmouth, and impatiently awaited the full moon they had decided on for the casting of the ritual.
- - - -
Harry stood impatiently next to Nott on one end of meadow near Nott’s manor that they had chosen. This particular ritual didn’t have to be conducted in the middle of Diagon Alley, which by itself would have made it superior as far as Harry was concerned. But it did have to be at night, and the only light that shone down at the moment was that of the full moon, ascended nearly as high as it would get, and the light of their sparkling candles, fixed in the earth at either end of the space that the oval would occupy.
Harry’s whole being was fixed on Nott, even the thoughts of resurrecting his loved ones and easing their grief driven to the back of his mind. He saw the moment when Nott inclined his head perfectly.
Harry lifted his wand and cried, “Inicio!”
The magic snapped out of him, not a specific spell but an intent-directed invocation, and seized the crushed opal dust. Nott had cast at the exact same time, and the sparkling motes whirled and began to dance into place, laying out the huge oval that would contain the inner circles, over such an expanse of grass that they would take ten minutes to cover.
Harry didn’t need to pay attention to the opal dust from now on, as the magic kept flowing by itself and steadily draining from both him and Nott. He glanced at the second bag by his feet, that of shed scales from thirteen different kinds of snakes, and hissed, “Begin as I command you.”
The bag tore open, the gathering, heavy magic in the air doing it of its own will, and the scales spilled out.
“Boomslang,” Harry called. The dark green scales whirled away and moved into position, creating the first of the thirteen inner circles inside the oval. Nott stood by, watching quietly. He couldn’t help since he wasn’t a Parselmouth, but he would be the one making sure there were no disruptions and lending the bulk of the passive magical support for this next ten minutes while Harry did the active one.
“Black mamba.”
Dark shed scales joined the green ones, and Harry heard a voice hissing softly, not speaking words but simply imprinting the sound of the deadly snake’s voice into the ritual. He kept from sighing with an effort. It was working.
“King cobra.”
As another set of scales moved and poured into position, Harry critically examined the circles that the boomslang and mamba scales were constructing. They needed to be perfectly circular and to span the exact same amount of space, with a thin thread of grass between them, and their outer edges touching the oval at top and bottom. In addition, the circle of boomslang scales needed to rest against the nearer side of the oval, which the opal flakes had luckily already put in place.
“Banded krait.”
Nott made a swift gesture. Harry looked at him, but he gave a reassuring nod, and Harry returned to what he was doing, deciding that whatever minor magical fluctuation Nott had sensed had been handled.
“Fer-de-lance.”
On and on it went, the chant of serpentine names, the pour of serpentine scales, and the falling-into-place of the opal flakes. Already, Harry could see the gathering flashes of red and green and blue and purple above them, and only didn’t nod in satisfaction because it might disrupt his incanting. That was why opal flakes were necessary for this ritual, because they were the most changeable of gems and wielded the power to change time itself, if used properly.
The last circle of scales, that of the blue krait, settled against the far side of the oval, the one near Nott. Harry drew in a hoarse, whistling breath. Savage magical exhaustion dragged at him; he could feel his lungs laboring.
But he couldn’t lie down yet. And his determination when he remembered Ginny’s face, Hermione’s, Lily’s and Jamie’s and Rose’s and Hugo’s and Molly’s, drove him on.
He reached out and laid his right hand over his left wrist. He could see Nott clasping his right wrist with his left hand on the far side of the oval. Harry nodded and focused on the sides of the oval.
The magic was rising, but so thickly that it seemed sluggish, without any outwards manifestation as yet. Harry leaned forwards slightly, focusing on the oval and the circles of snake scales, chanting softly under his breath. Nott had said that the ritual didn’t care what they chanted at that point, so Harry simply recited the names of the snakes whose scales he had used in the center circles. The important point was to stay focused, so that the magic could act through them and manifest—
There.
The snap of golden light along his side of the oval was matched by a heavy surge of dark green along Nott’s side. And then the manifestations Harry had been told about appeared. A hippogriff made of shining yellow light paced along the oval next to him, a slow, measured walk, while an emerald dragon flew above it on Nott’s side.
Harry met Nott’s eyes. They were shining with feverish excitement. Harry nodded, and clamped his fingers down on his left wrist. If they had done it right—
They had. His fingers parted the skin of his left wrist as though they were made of steel. The blood sprang forth, and Harry directed it to drip carefully on the opal flakes and the pacing hippogriff image. Nott would be doing the same with the dragon on the other side.
At the first fleck of blood, the hippogriff halted, wings fanning back. It turned to glance at Harry, and there was something sharper than the blades that had parted his skin in those eyes. It prowled towards him without leaving the oval, “skin” of light bulging and rippling. Something was breaking through.
Harry kept his eyes on the hippogriff, and the way that murky tentacles spread out from it, and scales coiled and danced into the air, as if he were looking at a segment of a snake without an end. Noting mattered except that he stand firm.
“What is your desire?”
Two voices spoke at once, one from the transforming hippogriff and one from whatever the dragon had become on Nott’s end, in perfect harmony. Harry felt his ears begin to bleed from the effort of hearing it.
He ignored that. He spoke at the exact same time with Nott, something they’d practiced until it came naturally. “To return to two minutes before noon on the fifteenth of July, 2015, in Diagon Alley.” The accident had happened at two minutes before one.
“What is your second desire?”
“To keep our memories intact,” Harry chanted in time with Nott, “and know exactly what we must do to stop the accident from killing our loved ones.”
“What is your third desire?”
“That the intent of the ritual be fulfilled,” Harry and Nott said in time, “with our connections to others as the price, and exact replicas of ourselves be created to take our places in our loved ones’ lives, leaving us alone as the only ones who remember the past.”
The images pacing the oval, which now looked nothing like the hippogriff and dragon that had technically birthed them, stopped and pulsed in silence. Harry struggled to avoid looking at Nott. In the end, these Dark creatures had to be the ones to accept the price and grant what they’d asked for, or not. As far as Harry could tell, they’d done everything perfectly up until this point. They just had to wait.
“Granted.”
Harry felt the iron grip of the magic that had been hovering above the ritual space, and held his breath to avoid screaming. It felt as if pincers were grabbing his chest, twisting, and wrenching him through space—
Nott screamed, and the world seemed to spin sideways into a long, slanting corridor of black light. Harry dived down it, and on the other end of the tunnel were light and stone, growing nearer and nearer.
