Harry Potter:
Blood leaks from Harry’s fingers, dribbles down to coalesce and congeal on the floor he tramps across as he leaves Snape behind him. There’s so much of it — more than Harry reasonably thought was possible but here it is staining his clothes crimson and flagging his losses for all to see. Harry rubs a hand over his face without thinking, smears the cooling fluid across it and the feel of it sends a shudder of disgust through him.
His mouth creases at the corners, heavy lines beside the gash of his mouth as he determinedly sets himself for the battle to come. In any other circumstance, he would never leave an injured ally behind — not even a hated one. Not that long ago, Snape would have been one, but with the full onslaught of his memories still whirling through his mind, Harry isn’t sure what to think.
He’s never been particularly good at processing emotions, never really tried to despite Hermione’s nagging that it wasn’t healthy to bottle them up only for them to overflow in an explosion of fury. Sometimes Harry regrets being as honest with his friends as he is, spilling so many prominent thoughts as they occur to him like fingers on a keyboard. After a childhood of bruises and suppression, he supposes it comes naturally if not healthily.
Maybe Hermione was right about his emotions, but it’s not like Harry ever had time to just sit there and think about them. Not with school and Voldemort bearing down on him with equal fervor, haunting his steps as a literal boogeyman.
The floorboards groan under his weight and Harry presses his lips together firmly, ignores the smell of mold and mildew mixed with dust and death as he creeps out of the Shrieking Shack. He cocks his head and lifts an arm to rub his face off on his robes and hopes he gets most of it. He can only imagine how ghastly he’d look presenting himself for the side of good while looking like a serial killer.
Snape groans from somewhere far behind him and Harry’s heart plummets into his stomach. He feels ready to sick up, to wrench and heave the last trappings of Snape’s memories from his body with a visceral pain that sizzles in his veins. There’s so much he doesn’t know about the man, so much that he never knew he might actually want to know until now. Snape was friends with his mom — not just friends, but he was as much in love with her as his father was.
The weight of that knowledge both sags heavily in his mind and electrifies him. It explains all the things that didn’t make sense over the years — but, Hermione’s voice chides, it doesn’t excuse them. Snape was horrible to Harry even if he was protecting him and there’s something intense and biting that wants to crawl back the way he came and hiss at Snape that with his upbringing, he should have known better — done better.
Snape knew the pains of being unloved and abused and it boggles Harry’s brain that he could then live on to perpetuate the same crimes to generations of children. Harry can’t imagine looking at a person so small and fragile, one that’s still developing, and so much as snapping at them, much less marring their innocence with fear. A morbid piece of Harry, one he tries to keep underwraps, can’t help but wonder about all the things that had to have happened to Snape that he hadn’t shared that could twist up a person so much that they live on to become the abuser.
Pity blossoms, delicate and weighing down its petals, inside of Harry. What ifs bubble up inside of him, a dangerous prospect to consider when his mind desperately needs to remain clear and open. He likes to think that if he’d been alive when Snape was still just a student at Hogwarts, he’d have stepped in to stop his father and Sirius from their tag-team “fun”. It’s not like they would have been friends — that’s going too far, not if Snape was anything like Malfoy or the other Slytherins, but Harry can’t stand bullying.
Harry wonders if that would have changed anything, if someone stepping in would have led Snape down a different path — and how that would have changed everything. If he’d never become a death eater or come to work at Hogwarts, then would Dumbledore have ever had a spy among them? How many more people would have died without Snape’s intel? Would that have changed the fate of the entire war?
Grass tickles Harry’s ankles; it peaks up from beneath his feet, overgrown and cheerfully unaware. Light streams into Harry’s eyes and he lifts an arm to shield himself from it as he trudges half-heartedly, but steadily, towards the battle taking place. His head hurts, but more than that his heart aches so badly that he can feel it in every step he takes, a steady thrumming pulse that elicits the shakes in his hands.
There are more important things to be thinking about than a dying man left behind in an old shack. Harry doesn’t have the luxury of distraction, not when there are so many people relying on him to end this war. He drops his strained hand into his left pocket, wraps his fingers around the snitch inside it, and squeezes tightly enough to imprint it into his skin.
Harry has a date with death — but he’s not the only one.
* * *
A green hue lights up the Forbidden Forest, as bright and unforgiving as it is brief. It flickers out in the blink of the eye, yielding from Harry’s own spell before collapsing backwards onto Voldemort. The elder wand scatters away to Harry and it’s in his hand before he registers lifting his arm to catch it. It settles warm against his palm, deceptively light and compelling Harry to use it.
He sucks in a shaky breath, his lungs heaving as he watches surprise flit across Voldemort’s face as his skin flakes off. He disintegrates into ash and the wind catches pieces of him, sends them drifting in all directions as he locks eyes with Harry. There’s something wry among the anguish, but at the last second they skitter to something behind him. Harry doesn’t turn to look and instead watches the last of Voldemort until there’s nothing left.
A raucous cheer goes up as Harry drops to his knees; his wands clatter against the earth as he braces himself up with one hand. All around him are jubilant faces, a blur that stings his eyes before he registers the wetness on his cheeks. He’s not sure what happened, not yet, not really, but he’d won with a disarming spell and — is it really all over?
There’s a faint whistling behind him and it’s getting louder, but it’s such a small thing that Harry can only sniffle and allow himself a tremulous smile. He rests back against his knees as he catalogs the faces of everyone around him. He hadn’t had a chance to really look earlier, but there are so many more people still alive than he’d expected. He knows he should be grateful — and he will be — but right now there are a few key faces he’s looking for.
There!
“Harry!” Hermione says in a breathless rush. She runs over to him with Neville and Ron on her heels, her face streaked with dirt and tears. She drops beside him with a laugh and wraps her arms around him and Harry feels Ron do the same.
Neville lingers just outside of their embrace, awkward and uncertain of his welcome until Ron snorts and says, “Oi! Get over here, you great lump!” The four of them hug each other for a long moment before they pull apart to grin stupidly at one another. “We did it,” Ron says, awe warring with exhaustion. “You did it, Harry.”
“All I did was cast expelliarmus,” Harry protests, his cheeks stinging pink.
“Well,” Hermione says and the whistling is getting harder to ignore now, but Harry manages it, “Whatever you did, it was brilliant!”
“Oh, Harry, you should have seen it,” Ron interjects with sudden enthusiasm; he throws up his hands and gesticulates wildly. “Neville killed Nagini, just splat! Cut off her head!”v
“Anyone would have done it,” Neville says, mimicking Harry’s earlier modesty. He rubs a hand scraped raw over the back of his neck. “Gryffindor’s sword appeared — ”
“He saved our lives,” Ron blurts out and beside him Hermione frowns, tips her head back and looks up at the sky. Her mouth opens in an “o” and incredulousness writes itself indelibly across her features. It’s enough to jerk Harry’s eyes up to the sky and — there’s only seconds to process the giant bomb careening towards them.
“What — “ is all Harry gets out and a hand instinctively drops to his wands. His fingers curl around them as a searing heat explodes in his face, carving him backwards into the ground and throwing him an impossible distance. It’s so hot that Harry can’t even scream. It feels like his skin is being flayed off his body, cutting him open to his bone’s marrow and roasting him from the inside out. His eyeballs feel like they’re boiling in his skull and just as Harry thinks he can’t stand it any longer, the heat disappears and is replaced with a cooling salve that envelops his entire body.
Everything goes white.
* * *
Harry wakes to dust and a silence so loud that it hurts his ears.
When he lifts his head, he finds himself sprawled out in the middle of a crater, both wands still miraculously in his hand with one leg bent in the wrong direction. He doesn’t feel the pain, not even when he shifts it and tries to bend it at the knee. It’s as if he’s staring at someone else’s leg and not his own and he doesn’t know what to make of it.
“Shite,” Harry croaks out, but it turns into a cacophony of coughing and hacking that he still can’t hear. His guts are alight like worms are burrowing into them, making a home in his intestines and beating out a life of their own. Eventually, the coughing lets up and Harry bleats a surprised shout once he can gasp out a few full breaths, pushing himself up onto one arm. He lifts his other hand and finds, to his dismay, only the elder wand is still intact.
His wand is snapped, the unicorn hair a charred strand that serenely dangles the three pieces of it in the dry heat of the breeze. Harry stares down at it unseeingly until a flicker of activity to the right catches his attention. His head whips around as a blur of brown dodges out of sight and Harry attempts to scramble to his feet when he sees the two headed dog, but his broken leg capsizes beneath the weight and he collapses back into the dirt.
“Merlin’s tits,” Harry mutters to himself, sweat pricking at his temple as he instinctively lifts one hand to ward off the feral animal. He drops the broken wand to the ground and uses the elder wand, swishing it through the air warningly. The dog leaps for him and Harry rolls out of the way, his robes catching on a stake in the ground. “Come on,” Harry says to himself as he tries to yank himself free, “come on!”
The dog bounds onto Harry’s chest and snaps its jaws at his throat just as Harry stammers out a “Immobulus!” It freezes immediately, going inhumanly still. Drool dribbles down from the corners of its mouth and slathers across Harry’s neck as he shoves it off of him. Harry thinks there must be some kind of irony to the boy-who-lived almost losing his face to a hungry dog.
“Sorry, mate,” Harry says to the dog, failing to put a good distance between them. “I know you’re hungry, but I’m not lunch.” With the creature off him, it’s easier to see the tears in his robes and the way they’re wrapped around the stake. Blood seeps through the scratches in his clothes and paints the dirt red. Harry pats the wound with the shirt beneath his robes and wonders at his inability to feel pain.
“Something isn’t right there,” Harry says to himself, but it at least reminds him that his leg needs attending to. He frowns down at it, the hairs on the back of his neck lifted from his continued closeness to the dog. It looks even more broken than it’d been before, but luckily it only takes a quick spell to set the bones and mend the wound.
“Thank Merlin for magic.” If only he could reverse the obvious deafness he’s suffering from. Harry knows it’s possible, he’s seen potion experiments gone wrong before, but he doesn’t know the spell and until he finds someone that does, he’s just going to have to deal with it. It’s a minor annoyance, a fly that keeps visiting his skin regardless of how much he swats at it.
Harry attempts to push himself to his feet and this time it takes after he unwinds himself from his robes and the stake binding him. “Now,” he says, testing his leg against the dirt and finding it just as steady as the other, “I just need to get back home.” He looks around, but as far as he can see is a desert and the crater he’s in.
Closing his eyes, Harry takes a deep breath, gathers himself, and apprates to Hogsmeade. What he sees when he opens his eyes is not unlike the ruins he knows muggles see when they look at Hogwarts uninvited. “What…?” Harry’s eyes widen as he takes in the scattering of destroyed buildings. They’re familiar enough that he knows he’s in the right place, but it’s not until he sees the remains of a skeleton that he remembers the battle, the bomb.
— that’s right, it’s all coming back to him now. Harry had been so focused on the war in the wizarding world that he’d forgotten about growing up in one with the muggles. It’d seemed so far away, almost inconsequential, when there was a magical war he was directly involved in to contend with. Had they really done this? Had they really dropped a bomb on the wizarding world and destroyed everything?
It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be real. Tears tear at his eyes and there’s no one around there to see them fall. Harry cries like he’s dying as he wanders among the ruins, running his hand along the walls of the buildings that had been so beloved to him. He cries so hard that he feels like he can’t breathe and it’s only when snot is escaping into his mouth and on his sleeve that he remembers he wasn’t alone when the bomb dropped.
Harry apparates to the Burrow, but the sight he’s met with gags him. He stuffs his fist in his mouth around a cry and squeezes his eyes shut as he registers that, once again, he’s alone in the world. There’s no one left. There’s really no one. The debris is covered in cobwebs and Harry wonders, hysterically, why he was spared when he remembers the Deathly Hallows. He’s half tempted to throw them all to the ground, to smash the ring and tear up the cloak shrunken in his pocket.
He doesn’t, but it’s the closest he’s ever been to throwing everything to the wind.
Numbness settles in the wake of his grief and Harry doesn’t know how long he sits inside the remnants of the Burrow. It’s only when hunger begins to gnaw at him and nausea crowds his insides that he shakily begins to look for food. He finds nothing but the dog and his tears are renewed as he’s forced to use a vivisection spell to gut it for meat. Harry cooks and eats it and it’s the worst meal he’s ever had, even more so than the moldy leftovers he used to get from the Dursleys.
The next day Harry apprates to Little Whinging and is unsurprised to find more of the same. He picks through the wreckage for anything worthwhile and stumbles across a living corpse. It’s the first time he inadvertently reveals himself as a wizard to a muggle and the man drops to his knees and cries through murmurings about the second coming of Jesus Christ. Harry tries to make sense of his ramblings, but nothing makes sense and the man is too far gone. He has to apparate away to keep the man from following him.
That he’d done magic in public, in front of a muggle (even one as destroyed as this one was), and not been disciplined for it crumples away the last hopes he had of some kind of governing group of wizards remaining, but that someone survived reignites a spark of something that’s too fragile to be named.
Harry finds a group of people with their bodies still intact a few hours later. He claims amnesia and they reluctantly feed him information. He learns that he’s a devastating 260 years in the future, that the living corpses are called ghouls, that the world no longer knows who Harry Potter is, and how it runs on bottle caps. He comes back a few hours later with enough caps to cause suspicion, but no one can discern them from the real thing so he’s given food and a place to stay for the night.
The months pass in a blur after that. There are settlements if you know how to find them and cities that offer even more. Harry seeks out the most populated places he can find, but as hopes of finding someone familiar dwindle, he settles instead for any signs of a witch or wizard.
He finds no one.
Eventually, Harry forgoes the entire idea in a fit of pique and travels towards the sea. It’s the only thing in the world that still reminds him of Before. He spends weeks on the coast fishing and tanning his skin, wondering at how he can drink irradiated water and be unaffected. He’s heard tales of a few other people like him, but they’re rare enough that he’s never met one.
He fishes out a three-headed cod from the sea one day and, on a whim, transfigures it into a black cat. Harry names it Bat and, to his amusement, befriends it with offerings of fish. She follows him everywhere, a silent shadow without a voice that keeps him company.
It’s nearly a year after Harry wakes up in the future that he reunites the last person he expects to see. He wakes that morning to Bat curled atop his chest, one paw idly kneading at his breast and leaving tiny pinpricks of red behind. Harry doesn’t bother to stop her, doesn’t even feel it, until his bladder silently urges him to relieve himself.
She’s gone when he gets back and Harry frowns as he looks around the tent he set up a week ago. He goes inland by way of the grass instead of following the coast to see if she’s amused herself with a moth or butterfly. He finds her fifteen minutes later, but rather than greet him triumphantly with the rodent he can see mouthed between her teeth, she turns to make sure he’s watching and leads him away.
“Bat,” Harry says with exasperated amusement as he follows her. “You’re being a right asshole. I can’t just leave my shit laying around and not expect to be robbed. Come here.” She doesn’t, unsurprisingly. Instead she leads him to a hotel where a starved dog is milling around. He growls when she approaches, but stops when Bat drops the rat for him and walks away. The dog scarfs it down without thought and the smug look Harry gets from her is enough to surprise a chuckle from him.
“Alright, alright, I get the point,” Harry says, crouching down as she comes padding up to him. He extends a hand and she uses it to jump on his shoulders and settle around his neck.
Harry’s just turning to leave when he notices two people further in at the hotel. He stops to check his pockets and — sure enough, bottlecaps. He wonders if they’re open to trade, if they even have anything on them to trade. He calls out to them just as the door to a hotel room opens and a ghoul steps out.
Despite the year he’s lived in this newfangled world, Harry’s never gotten used to them. He does his best not to stare, but there’s something horrific about seeing someone with their skin peeled away that it constantly garners prickles of attention. “Excuse me,” Harry says to the ghoul and, despite himself, he begins to study him. There’s just something about the shape of his face that seems ungodly familiar like an itch he can’t quite scratch. He squints, his brows furrowing as he steps closer.
“S-Snape?” Harry blurts out the second he sees the gash of a scar on his throat. His glasses slide down his nose and Harry distractedly pushes them back up as he jogs up to him. “Is that — Merlin, is that _you_?”
Relief floods Harry, wraps him up so tightly that he’s laughing giddily before he can stop himself. “After — I just — “ Harry stammers, glancing down at himself. He’s wearing a pair of dirty old jeans, shoes, a cat, and nothing else. Shite. That’s a little awkward, but there’s nothing else for it now.
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