Chapter Text
A flash of green light and everything was gone.
The first thing Harry felt was uncomfortable pavement against his forehead. As he groggily pushed himself up, opening his eyes to see a familiar looking road, memories came flooding back.
Snape’s memory, the realisation that he would have to die in order to defeat the dark lord that had plagued Harry’s life since he was 11, telling Neville to kill Nagini, seeing Ginny one last time, though she didn’t know he was there. Then heading into the forbidden forest, using the resurrection stone to talk to his parents, Sirius, and Remus before inevitably joining them, following Yaxley and Dolohov to the spider’s hollow to face Voldemort one last time.
For neither can live while the other survives
The prophecy had been fulfilled, but not in the way Harry had expected when he first heard it, but in the way he had subconsciously been preparing himself to face. Harry had suspected the connection between Voldemort and himself ever since he learned about the horcruxes. He had just been too afraid to face it.
Now he was dead. But he felt alive somehow, at peace now that he knew he had fulfilled his purpose against Voldemort, or rather Tom Riddle. Harry had every faith that his friends would make that sick bastard mortal once more. It was only fitting that he be called by his actual name, Tom Riddle.
Harry looked around, expecting to see his parents, or Sirius, but instead he saw a familiar house, the hellhole that he had unfortunately called home for the first 11 years of his life.
As Harry stood up, aware that he was still wearing his robes, complete with the moleskine pouch Hagrid had given him tied around his neck and his invisibility cloak with Draco’s wand tucked underneath, he couldn’t help but think this was some sort of sick joke.
He laughed a mirthless laugh and said more loudly than he intended to, “Am I in fucking hell?”
A few moments later, as Harry turned around in circles, staring incredulously at his familiar surroundings, a lone light turned on on one of the houses, illuminating the otherwise empty and dark street.
“Hey!” yelled one of the many neighbours whose opinion mattered so much to Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, but who Harry could frankly not give a shite about, “Who’s out there?”
Instead of answering him, Harry ran. He ran until he was out of breath and at the park where he had faced the dementor while Dudley blubbered by his side all those years ago. The swing sets still looked the same.
Harry sat down and tried to get his bearings. The streetlamp off to the side illuminated part of the park. The outline of the other side could be seen by the predawn light.
It must be nearly 5am, but that didn’t make any sense. He was dead, wasn’t he? Harry held out his hand and pinched it. Judging by the pain, he at least wasn’t dreaming. So then was he in some sort of afterlife? Harry had never been one for religion, but he knew the basics of Heaven and Hell.
He looked around again, at the empty playground covered with graffiti, hoping to see his parents, or at least some other person who was also dead and could tell him where he was. Maybe that guy who yelled was also dead?
Or maybe Harry wasn’t dead at all, but had been transported to Privet Drive when Tom’s killing curse had struck him. He had survived the killing curse before after all. The more Harry thought about it, the more that theory made sense. He didn’t know what death felt like, but something in his gut was telling him that he was alive, and Harry’s instincts had been right thus far.
Panic struck Harry. His friends were at Hogwarts, in danger facing down a death eater invasion all because of him, while Harry was here mulling over his feelings like an idiot. He stood up and thought about the Hog’s Head, immediately apparating away from little whinging with a crack.
Hogsmeade looked surprisingly peaceful. Harry didn’t have much time to take in his surroundings, as his singular focus was on going to Hogwarts through Ariana’s portrait and finding Tom.
He had a sort of half-plan formed of how to defeat Riddle, involving recklessness and the realisation that he and Draco were now partial owners of the Elder wand, at least that’s what he gauged based on his wand ownership knowledge.
Harry did find it a bit odd though that Hogsmeade was devoid of death eaters and dementors. Its cobblestone streets held a tense atmosphere similar to those days during his 6th year, in the calm before the storm. Regardless, Hogsmeade seemed entirely different from when Harry, Ron, and Hermoine had arrived only a few hours before.
It was even odder when Harry entered the Hogshead, barging the door open like a maniac and rushing up the stairs towards Ariana’s portrait. He stopped and spared a look only when he heard the familiar voice of Aberforth, “Hey what’re you doing?”
Harry did a double take as he took in the room. There was Aberforth, his beard still white but with noticeably less lines on his face, calmly wiping the countertop of the bar around a passed out patron. The usual rump of the wizarding world sat silently in the booths, nursing a drink or slumped on a table.
Harry stood in complete disbelief. He had thought Aberforth was helping the Hogwarts students to safety or using his bar as a safeground for people too young or not eager to protect Hogwarts. “What do you mean, what am I doing? You heard Voldemort! The hour’s up I’m going back!”
His fever pitch turned down as Harry looked around himself again, “What are you doing?”
Aberforth put his elbows on the bar as his expression changed from one of wariness to slight anger, “Listen, I don’t know who you are, but old-you-know-who sure as hell aren’t up there, so either get out or come down here and buy a drink.”
“What are you talking about!” Harry’s bewilderment turned to anger at the bartender’s inaction. Now was not the time to have a drink. Tom was probably invading Hogwarts as they spoke, putting everybody Harry knew and loved in danger.
Harry was tempted to verbally berate Aberforth for not doing anything, but decided that it was not worth the time. Without another word, he flew up the stairs to the room above the bar. Sure enough, there was Ariana’s portrait.
As he tried to swing the painting open, Harry found that it wouldn’t open the same way Aberforth had shown Ron, Hermoine, and him just mere hours before. Harry cursed as his frustration grew and he tugged on the portrait which would not budge from the wall.
He only stopped when a strong hand gripped his arm, jerking him away from Ariana’s portrait. Harry stared into the angry face of Aberforth. “I don’t know who you are!” Dumbledore’s brother was now seething, “But get OUT!”
Harry stood there in shock for a split second before rushing past the man, down the stairs, and out into Hogsmeade. He didn’t know what to make of Aberforth’s strange behaviour. The bartender was acting as if he had never met Harry before, and Hogwarts wasn’t in the middle of being attacked by fucking death eaters, dementors, and Tom Riddle himself.
He stood in the middle of the empty street for a minute, before remembering that there were other ways into hogwarts. Since Snape’s dead body was still in the shrieking shack, Harry decided on the passageway from Honeydukes to the one eyed witch statue.
Putting on his invisibility cloak and grabbing Draco’s wand, Harry ran towards Honeydukes, past Zonko’s joke shop, that side street where Madam Puddifoot’s was, and the Three Broomsticks.
Hogsmeade was quiet, but in a strangely peaceful way. Harry had almost been sure that the battle raging in Hogwarts could be heard from where he stood. Maybe Voldemort was still in the Forbidden Forest, deciding not to attack given that he had no body as proof that he had really killed the boy who lived.
But the more Harry thought about it, the more that didn’t make any sense. Tom would probably jump at the chance to lie and tell everyone protecting Hogwarts that he had cowardly slipped away from the castle and Voldemort himself. From a tactical standpoint, it would rob anyone who stood against Voldemort of their last shred of hope.
A terrible thought struck Harry, what if the battle was over and all of his friends were already dead. Heart pumping with adrenaline, Harry unlocked the front door of Honeydukes with a quick Alohomora and ran inside.
Harry nearly fell down the stairs to the cellar as he opened the secret passageway, which was thankfully still there, just as he had remembered it all those years ago in third year.
The stone steps took forever to go down, and Harry was never more mad over the fact that he couldn’t just apparate into Hogwarts. When he finally made it into the damp and earthy stretch of the passageway, a straight shot to the castle, Harry stopped dead in his tracks for a second time.
Something about this situation did not feel right. Why was Hogsmeade quiet and almost normal looking? Why had Aberforth acted as if he didn’t know Harry and as if Hogwarts hadn’t been attacked an hour before? How on earth did Harry end up at Privet Drive after being struck with the killing curse?
Nothing made sense, at all. On instinct, Harry pulled the marauder’s map out of his moleskine pouch and tapped his wand to it, “I solemnly swear I am up to no good.”
The lines from his wand formed a familiar map of Hogwarts. Harry had been expecting a multitude of dots to appear on the grounds, marking out death eaters battling it out with his friends. Instead, Harry found that Hogwarts was almost entirely empty, save for…
Harry sat down on the earthy floor and did a double take, because marked on the marauders map was a dot titled Dumbledore, located at the headmaster’s office. Harry could almost imagine him sitting there, eating a sherbet lemon while reading a book as Fawkes watched on in its cage.
This should not be possible. The thought went through Harry’s head a million different times as he just sat there. How was Dumbledore alive and in his office? And why were the only other people at Hogwarts Professor’s Mcgonagall, Slughorn, Sprout, Flitwick, and a couple of other names Harry did not recognize, though he assumed they were teachers because their dots were located in the staff quarters.
There were other dots too, but only a couple in the hallways of the castle, and all of the names unrecognisable. According to the map, the dormitories were filled with sleeping students who Harry did not remember going to school with. It was a similar scene to when he had looked over the map during the dead of night a few years ago, when Hogwarts wasn’t in the middle of a battle.
The marauder’s map had never been wrong before, and judging by the strange stuff that had happened ever since Harry had been killed by the ol Avada Kedavra, it still wasn’t.
The only possible explanation was that he was somehow transported to a time when Dumbledore was alive and Tom wasn’t attacking Hogwarts. Which meant that Harry had time travelled.
The revelation hit him like a ton of bricks. He tried to think of alternative reasons for this bizarre situation, but time travel was the only solution that actually made sense. Before Harry could delve into a whole other host of questions, like how he had actually managed to time travel in the first place, and how would he be able to get back, he attempted to apparate away.
Luckily, Harry wasn’t quite within the grounds of Hogwarts yet, so with a crack, he appeared outside of a closed muggle newspaper stand he had once seen while walking to the ministry of magic with Mr.Weasley.
It was in the middle of an almost empty square. There was a homeless man lying on a bench using old newspapers as a pillow, and a couple of pissed looking teenagers loitering about, but none of them had noticed Harry appearing out of thin air.
Just as he had remembered, the front page of a newspaper from the previous day hung over a sign detailing newspaper and magazine prices. The date read November 2nd, 1979.
1979
Harry stood there, staring at those numbers for what simultaneously felt like seconds and hours. He didn’t notice as the sky brightened above him and the square became busier, passerbyers giving him odd looks as they walked by.
He was shaken out of his stupor by an angry voice, “Hey you, weird boy with the robes,” came the thick London accent.
Harry looked up to see a man inside the now opened newspaper stand, “Get out of the way! You’re blocking my sign!”
Harry stood numbly there for a second before processing what the man had just said to him. With a quick, “Um, Sorry sir,” he rushed away, striding quickly and not knowing where he was going.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The forest of Dean looked beautiful. The tree’s were shaded hues of red, orange, and yellow, and the green grass was still there, though a little diminished by all of the brown leaves on the ground. The lake where Ron had saved Harry from drowning stretched out before him, shimmering in the mid-morning light.
Harry didn’t exactly know why or how he ended up in the forest of Dean, but as he sat on a rock by the lake’s edge, he was grateful for the quiet. It made it easier for him to figure out what the fuck was going on.
So he time travelled, that much was certain. He had time travelled to a time when his parents were alive, Sirius was alive, Remus, Tonks, Fred, almost all of his friends were alive. Though most of them, including himself, were infants or not quite born yet.
Harry heard Hermoine’s voice from all the way back in third year warn about the danger of travelling through time. He knew that his number one priority should be getting back in order not to disrupt the timeline, but Harry wasn’t so sure he would be able to. He didn’t use a time turner. His travel through time was a fluke sort of accident. Harry wasn’t sure what type of accident, but he had his theories.
The one thing that Harry knew was that he couldn’t interact with anyone important, causing a butterfly effect that might cause huge changes to the timeline, people dying…
But people already did die in the past, unnecessarily. Harry was robbed of his parents, his godfather. Cedric died for no reason other than he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Remus and Tonks died at the battle, leaving yet another orphan as a result of a senseless war. Fred died, Colin died, Lavender, Dobby, Hedwig, the names swirled around Harry’s head. The worst part was he knew that there were countless others probably dead the minute he came back to his own time.
How long had he even been gone? At this point, the death eaters had probably invaded Hogwarts yet again, wiping out countless others. Ron, Hermoine, the entire Weasley clan. Harry choked up at the thought of losing them too, knowing that they were probably already dead if he came back.
As he sat on that rock, Harry thought, ‘Screw it. Even if there is an option to go back to 1998, I’m not going. Screw the timeline. I’m going to break it for the better. People are going to live.’
Harry knew that by doing this, he was losing his relationship with his two best friends, any hope of a relationship with Ginny, and everyone he ever loved. They would be babies now, or not yet born. The thought of forging a friendship with the same intensity of before, with them having no recollection of a past that only he knew of, was ludicrous.
He was okay with that though. Harry was happy to see his loved ones live fulfilling lives, even without him. The thought of Fred and George being their usual mischievous selves, instead of one dead and the other broken beyond repair that Harry had seen hours before in the great hall, filled him with joy.
With renewed rigour, Harry stood up. He had a plan to defeat Voldemort and prevent nearly all of the deaths that had happened in his lifetime.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first thing Harry did was set up camp in a seedy muggle motel place on the outskirts of London. He had sat passenger next to Dudley while Aunt Petunia rode in the front seat as Uncle Vernon drove them all down this road before, when the biggest problem Harry faced was avoiding the attention of his belligerent relatives.
He barely remembered it, and since most wizards, especially death eaters, knew next to nothing about muggles, it was the perfect place to lay low.
Since Harry had no muggle money on him, he discreetly confounded the front desk lady for a key to an empty room, but that was all the magic he used. Muggle technology went all wonky around magic and it would only draw unwanted ministry attention to himself if misuse of magic around muggles was detected.
So Harry slept that night, in a plain room and on a lumpy mattress. He forgot to eat amidst his thoughts about what this all meant. Harry now had a chance to save everyone, but he knew that he had to be careful about how he went about that.
He knew that it would be unwise to affect the timeline in unnecessary ways, causing a butterfly effect that might result in unplanned events which Harry would have no prior knowledge to stop. His plan now still might cause unknown consequences, but if Harry kept a low profile, it was more likely to prevent Voldemort from taking over the wizarding world and killing countless people.
That ruled out meeting his parents, anybody really, and asking them for help. As much as Harry wanted to. They would be 19 right now though, only two years older than himself, so they would probably be weirded out if Harry went up to them and announced, “Hey, I’m your 17 year old son from the future. Want to help me destroy these horcruxes?”
Horcrux hunting was the plan. Now that he knew what and where most of them were, finding and destroying pieces of Voldemort’s soul would be easy…
Well, at least the diadem and the ring would be easy enough to get. Harry would either have to break into Grimmauld place to steal the locket, or somehow track down Sirius’s brother and help him retrieve it without dying from the inferi. It all depended on if Voldemort had actually hid the locket in the cave yet. Hufflepuff’s cup and the diary would be harder to attain though, seeing as they were either with Voldemort himself or in the Lestrange vault and Malfoy Manor.
Destroying the horcruxes would prove to be a whole other hurdle. Harry did not yet have the sword of gryffindor, nor did he know or trust himself to create fiendfyre without it getting out of control like it had for Crabbe right before Harry time travelled. The only other option was basilisk venom, though he didn’t like the thought of revisiting the chamber of secrets.
Harry’s last thought, as he drifted into an uneasy sleep, was that he would cross that bridge when he got there.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After waking up with his stomach rumbling and stealing a shepherd's pie from a nearby pub with his invisibility cloak at the ripe hour of 12 pm, Harry apparated to the graveyard of little Hangleton.
The place hadn’t changed much since 1995, though it definitely looked less eerie in the daytime and without a horde of death eaters surrounding a newly resurrected Tom Riddle. Sunlight illuminated the graves, some adorned with recently placed flowers. A white church stood nearby, giving the graveyard a picturesque feel to it.
As the graveyard was on the outskirts of the town, Harry didn’t see much of little hangleton, instead walking towards the rundown manor that looked similar to the one he saw in the memory of Riddle’s family. According to that same memory, a rundown shack would be somewhere nearby.
Sure enough, as Harry came closer, only being interrupted by a group of kids on bicycles who looked at him oddly, he saw the outline of a path that looked somewhat similar to the one that the ministry worker had apparated on in the memory Dumbledore had shown him.
Harry walked past the manor and closer to where he thought the shack might be. After going down the path, and searching the area a bit more thoroughly, he finally found it, though the place could hardly be called a house.
The roof was caved in and the nettles that had once only reached the windows, now covered them completely. Trees blocked the shack from the view of anyone who wasn’t intentionally looking for it and the moss that infested the walls made it appear to be more of an abnormally large bush than a house. Harry could barely make out the caved in roof and the snake, looking worse for wear, which was still nailed to the front entrance.
There was surprisingly very little magic stopping Harry from striding up to the door. Not that he was complaining, though he did expect something more out of ol’ Tom.
When he tried opening the door though, it wouldn’t budge. Even a simple alohomora did nothing. Rolling his eyes, Harry turned to the snake on the door, and focusing on talking to the snake, said, “Open up you.”
The door opened, revealing a dust filled living room area with cobwebs and dirt on all of the furniture. The back of the room was covered in wooden rafters and shingles.
Harry immediately scanned the house for any sign of the resurrection stone ring, or a box. After opening every drawer and cupboard in the house, finding nothing but spiders that would convince Ron to move out of England entirely, Harry sat down on the least rotten part of the floor that he could find.
He knew when starting up his search, that searching through cupboards was going to be in vain. Tom liked to have an aura of mystery around him. He wouldn’t hide a part of his soul in something common. Why Tom took pride in the weird incest part of his family, Harry would never know.
He strangely did understand the feeling though. Harry had experienced a certain wistfulness when learning about his connection with the Peverells, and even the Potters to some extent. Knowing that he was connected to an ancient wizarding family somehow made him feel even more intertwined with a world where he felt he truly belonged.
Which made Harry wonder, why would Tom’s horcrux be in this shack in the first place? It didn’t appear to be a place passed down through generations of a once ancient and noble wizarding family. If he remembered correctly, the Gaunts had been forced to live in the shack due to their poor money decisions.
A thought came to Harry. The manor near the shack, where Tom Riddle senior had lived, reminded him of the Malfoy manor if it had been abandoned for 20 years. There was a stately aura around it that was somehow different from the manors of regular muggle lords.
Another thing was the shack. Why was it so close to the house? The closest homes nearby were in the town below. It was almost as if the shack had once been a groundskeeper's shed for a property that was more expansive in the past.
Harry now had a working theory. The Gaunts had once owned the Riddle Manor, but as they fell on hard times, they had been forced to sell more and more of their property, which turned into little Hangleton as the years flew by.
Soon, they only had the manor, which was sold, as obvious by the Riddle occupants. But as Harry witnessed in the ministry worker’s memories, the Gaunts were proud of their magical family heritage above all else. They wouldn’t want to leave the land their family had lived and owned for generations, even if it meant living in a shack.
But Tom Riddle wouldn’t leave a part of his soul in the shack that his family had been forced to live in due to their poverty. That would ruin the illusion of grandeur he had of the magical side of his family. He would want his soul to be placed in the manor that represented his family’s past prominence.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As Harry entered the mansion, wearing his invisibility cloak for caution, he turned next to him, as if to ask Ron if there was any wizarding hiding place traditions, only to realise that Ron was not next to him, which in turn led to the thought that the Ron he knew would never exist again.
Harry slid down onto the solid but dusty wood flooring of the front entry hall. He had led himself into the front door as the groundskeeper, the same one that he had seen in the dream before his fourth year, the same person who had cheered him on as a ghost in the graveyard just a couple minutes walk from where Harry sat, was tending to the back garden.
As much as Harry had the strange urge to go up to the old groundskeeper and warn him of his death in the next 20 years, he knew that that was an unnecessary risk to take. Everything Harry did could cause what Hermoine had coined the butterfly effect and change the future in unknown ways, so he only changed what was absolutely necessary, finding and destroying horcruxes while confounding random muggles for food.
Plus, it wasn’t as if the old guy would believe Harry if he just came up to him and warned him to not investigate any strange occupants in the house in 20 years time. If all went to plan, which was a big if since Harry did not have a plan past finding the horcruxes and destroying them once again, the gardener would not be in danger of Voldemort at all.
It was at this moment that Harry truly felt the loss of his friendship with Ron and Hermoine. They would undoubtedly be useful to him right now, helping him find the ring in the Riddle manor in a fraction of the time that it would probably take him to do it alone, but their help wasn’t what Harry yearned for.
Harry felt tears dripping down the sides of his face as he realised that his friends, the ones who had stayed steadfast by his side since that experience with the mountain troll in their first year, would never be the same ones that he knew. They, like everyone else Harry had ever grown to care for, were erased from existence.
Sure they would still exist, but the events that they had experienced would never happen. Harry would never be their friend, preventing them from being the people that he knew in 1998.
Ron would probably still be living in his brothers’ shadows, having his greatest ambition to be everything they were and more. He no doubt would be the same brave and loyal person who always knew how to make Harry’s life a million times better, who had stood by his side in even the most dire of situations, but Harry would never be able to experience that friendship again.
Harry would never be able to experience Hermoine’s nagging again, which at first he hated, but he had grown to love her not despite her know-it-allness and obsession with homework and house-elf welfare, but because of it. Harry would never be able to experience her ruthlessness, her intelligence and dedication. Hermoine would never tell him to do his homework ever again.
As Harry sat there for hours, feeling selfish for mourning a friendship when his decision to not go back to the future and instead destroy the horcruxes was most likely to result in many lives not being ruined, he found solace in the fact that Hermoine and Ron would live on, without him yes, but they would be able to thrive in a time not marred by war and the constant threats that came from being his friends.
By the time he found the energy to stand up and look for the horcrux, the sun had nearly set. Harry took out his wand, which was stashed in the right sleeve of his robe so it was simultaneously hidden and accessible, and cast a nonverbal lumos.
The mansion was in definite need of repair and a good cleaning, but it wasn’t in the completely abandoned ruin state of the shack that had once housed Merope, Morfin, and Marvolo Gaunt.
The windows were cracked, and there was some obvious water damage to parts of the floor, alluding to the roof not being entirely functional, but besides those problems, Harry could see the shadow of a stately manor in the house.
It really did remind him of Malfoy manor. The long long dining room table, though laden with dust, was eerily similar to the one where Harry had seen, through Tom’s eyes, Draco and his family embarrassed in front of their fellow death eaters.
Looking back on the past year, Harry couldn’t hold any feeling towards the Malfoy family but pity, and the tiniest bit of gratefulness. That feeling, or absence of feelings, was probably the reason why Harry had bothered to save the little ferret. Draco was stuck up and spoiled, no doubt about that, but he obviously regretted joining the death eaters, but of course he couldn’t just hand in his letter of resignation.
While ambling through the house, not really caring about the groundskeeper hearing the noise he was making and with no real solid plan as to how to find the ring horcrux, Harry thought about the death eaters, wondering how they had gotten involved with Tom and if they regretted their decision.
Regulus Black, Severus Snape, and Igor Karkaroff came to mind as the known death eaters who had gotten away, or at least tried to escape.
Igor had been killed trying to leave England. Not because he disagreed with what the death eaters ideology, though he might have disagreed with some of it, but because he knew that Voldemort would kill him anyway for giving away information to the ministry so shortly after Tom’s supposed death in order to save his own skin.
This led Harry to believe that Karkaroff hadn’t joined the death eaters for ideological reasons, though he probably did agree with them on the common held belief of the superiority of purebloods, but for transactional reasons. Voldemort was rising in power, and Karkaroff wanted to be a part of that.
That’s also probably why most of Voldemort’s supporters were Slytherins. They saw the power he wielded and the support he had, and the transactional ambitious types didn’t want to miss the boat. The ones who claimed to be imperiused the minute Voldemort fell from power weren’t true believers, as evident by their actions. They didn’t even bother to help bring their old leader back to life when he had fallen from grace, obviously happy to be left to their lives without following the whims of a psychopath.
Harry knew full well that Tom knew this, but couldn’t do anything about it because their backing gave him power. That’s why he branded them with the dark mark and ruled them by fear. In the beginning, he probably came across as a charismatic leader who took widespread beliefs that most of the wealthy part of the wizarding society held and amplified them into radical ideas, sucking in old money and fresh blood into his cult.
By the time Voldemort became as crazy as he was in Harry’s time, it was too late. The majority of the death eaters could not back out, else be murdered by their own leader. Harry saw the uneasy look of most of the death eaters around the Malfoy table, regretting the decision to join the dark lord, but sticking the course for fear of death.
Even Snape, whose loyalty never truly laid with Tom, never escaped him. He was forced to act as spy, interact with the monster who had killed the person he loved, pretend to be loyal to him, and live in danger of being discovered. Snape was never truly free of Voldemort. The minute he refused to be a servant of Voldemort was the minute that he died.
And he didn’t die with his head held high, willingly facing death to defy Voldemort. It was tragic really, that the man who had secretly protected Harry all his life had died by a snake bite, not yet having escaped the dark lord.
Regulus was the only person on the list of escaped death eaters who had truly escaped. He had died of course, but on his own terms. Harry remembered Regulus’s letter to the dark lord I face death in the hope that when you meet your match, you will be mortal once more.
The only way to escape the life of a death eater once becoming one was to face death, something that Tom could never do. Otherwise, because of the dark mark, a death eater member couldn’t escape Voldemort unless the dark lord himself died. Neither could live while the other survived. It was eerily similar to Harry’s own situation, except the death eaters were in a hell of their own making.
Harry sat in an armchair, not before casting a scourgify charm on it, as his thoughts drifted to the ring horcrux, which made him wonder if he was still a horcrux, but he knew that he wasn’t.
Harry’s instincts never lied. He innately knew somehow, the minute that he had woken up in front of Privet drive, high on adrenaline, that he was no longer a horcrux. It was as if a huge weight had been lifted from his mind. Harry was no longer connected to Voldemort, would no longer see visions of what he was doing when he felt particularly angry.
Despite still being able to speak parseltongue, which must be a permanent side effect of being the horcrux of Tom Riddle, Harry’s brain felt different. He couldn’t explain why it did, but it did.
It was a relief, but a hidden part of Harry was also disappointed. Sue him, Harry had a major nosey side. He liked all of the information to be upfront, which made Dumbledore’s cryptic messages and inability to get to the point infuriating, not to mention that not having information, next to Harry’s foolhardiness, had been what killed Sirius.
The link into Tom Riddle's mind had been, just like the fact that Harry could not contain his curiosity, a hindrance and a help, but more useful than not. Hermoine and Dumbledore would disagree with this point of view, but they couldn’t argue with the fact that Harry’s insight into Tom’s personal plans had made him a more useful spy than Snape.
Otherwise he wouldn’t have known about Tom’s plan to find the elder wand. Without the connection he shared with Voldemort, Harry doubted he would have been able to find the diadem. He understood Tom Riddle on a deeper level than simply knowing his tragic backstory.
After contemplating a little more on to where the ring horcrux would be, which devolved into thoughts about nothing because Harry’s mind was fried from all of the events that had transpired in a short period of time, he finally said, “Fuck it,” and cast a nonverbal accio spell for the ring.
It did not show up, causing Harry to groan. He would have to find a piece of Tom Riddle’s soul the muggle way, which would probably infuriate the old bastard.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harry practically lived in his invisibility cloak that week. He didn’t return to the hotel room, deciding it was too risky despite the fact that no one here was trying to hunt him down nor knew he even existed.
He set up in the Riddle house, sleeping under his invisibility cloak on a bed that always remained dusty no matter how many scourgify charms he cast. He stole just enough food to get by from the local pub, and spent the rest of his time systematically searching the Riddle manor from top to bottom.
The groundskeeper, who Harry learned from eavesdropping on some gossip when stealing from the local pub, was a veteran called Frank Bryce who everyone in the town suspected had killed the Riddles.
Their suspicions were entirely incorrect, especially since Frank, while Harry’s observations determined the man grumpy and bitter, was obviously a good person, judging by how the man stood up to Voldemort and cheered Harry on during that duel in the graveyard, despite the fact that he didn’t know what was going on.
Frank Bryce luckily didn’t notice Harry, only going into the kitchen once to yell at who he thought were some kids messing around when Harry accidentally upturned a closet while looking for the Horcrux.
Harry’s stay at the riddle house drew to a close when he finally found the ring, hidden under the floorboards of the drawing room where he had witnessed Tom killing the groundskeeper during one of his vision dreams the summer before 4rth year.
It was placed in a small golden box with tiny pictures of a coiled snake in front of tiny waves of water decorating the entirety of the outside. Tom must have created this horcrux back when he was deep in his whole heir of Slytherin phase.
There were heavy wards placed around the box, which Harry could sense when he had reached his hands towards it and felt a strong prickling sensation, but could not do anything about it since he had never taken ancient runes. He opted to wingardium leviosa the box into the moleskine pouch and hoped that the wards would only activate if the box was open.
Honestly, the drawing room should have been the first place that Harry had looked, but in some respects he didn’t exactly want to leave the safe confines of the house where Voldemort had murdered his dad.
Systematically searching the dusty and decaying manor from top to bottom was strangely cathartic. It allowed Harry to have something mind numbing to do while sorting through his thoughts.
Hermoine, Ron, and him had become so interconnected and dependent on each other that Harry had trouble grasping the fact that their friendship was truly gone. At multiple points during his search he would turn over to where Ron or Hermoine usually stood, wanting to ask a question or make a comment, but they wouldn’t be there and a terrible sadness overtook him.
He would have to sit down and do nothing for hours on end everytime the revelation hit him. Every new time would be more painful than the rest. Then Harry would drag himself off the floor and search the house again, reminding himself that he had a mission to accomplish and lives to save.