Chapter Twenty-Nine of 'Kairos Amid the Ruins'- The Second Shattering
Chapter Twenty-Eight.
Chapter One.
Title: Kairos Amid the Ruins (29/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry Potter/Orion Black, Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald, mentions of various canon pairings
Content Notes: Time travel, heavy angst, Harry mentoring Severus, violence, gore, minor character deaths, AU
Rating: R
Summary: Harry’s attempt to time travel and fix the past went badly awry. Time shattered, and the various pieces of the universe clung to each other as best they could. Harry finds himself in 1961, with Albus Dumbledore the Minister for Magic, Gellert Grindelwald his loving husband, Voldemort newly defeated…and Severus Snape being proclaimed the Boy-Who-Lived
Author’s Note: This is going to be a long story, focusing on Harry mentoring Severus as the Boy-Who-Lived, with flashbacks to an alternate World War II. The Harry-Severus mentorship will remain gen. However, the romantic pairings are a prominent part of the story. The word “Kairos” comes from the Greek, meaning a lucky moment, or the right moment, to act.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Nine-The Second Shattering
Harry sighed as he crumpled up yet another letter from the Potters. They had moved from wanting some kind of formal renunciation of Charlus Potter’s money to asking for him to attend family meetings and explain why he refused to give the renunciation.
Why don’t they believe me when I tell them I don’t want the damn money?
Harry shook his head. He supposed that it was probably the same reason the Malfoys, in his original world, had been stunned to learn that Harry didn’t want any money from them. Some people believed Galleons were so important that there was no reason or way someone would ever refuse them.
He stood and moved to look out through the window of his office that commanded a decent view of the Forbidden Forest. It was a dim, cool day, the wind chasing so many thick grey clouds across the sky that Harry felt as if he was looking at an endless flock of birds flying past.
He thought about going out to do some flying himself, but he had more than enough marking to do. He shook his head again and turned back to his desk.
Someone knocked on his office door, and Harry looked up. He wasn’t expecting any student in particular, but they often came to visit him without a formal announcement ahead of time, especially since they were getting more used to him. “Come in.”
Silence followed. Harry narrowed his eyes and reached for his wand.
The door burst open, crashing against the wall with a noise so loud that Harry was half-surprised no one else came running to investigate. But then his mind changed and turned away from the rescue that wasn’t coming, because the person who charged through the door definitely wasn’t a student.
A curse boiled towards him. Harry dropped to the floor and rolled behind the shelter of the desk, waited until the hooded figure-almost certainly the one he had seen once before-circled it in search of him, then kicked out and sent the chair slamming into the person’s mid-section.
The figure bent over, exhaling in what sounded like pain. Harry hoped it was. He rolled out from beneath the desk and took a dueling stance, watching as the hitched breaths stopped and the figure slowly straightened up.
“You will come with me, Potter. The time for giving you a choice is over.”
That voice was sharply familiar, tugging at his memories but not plunging him back into them. But Harry had more important things to do right now than figure out whether this was someone he had met in the last few years or not. He created a shield wall in front of him, turning a full circle to do it, so that he would be protected from the waist down but could use the space above to fire his spells.
“Intending to stand in one place? That will make my task easier.”
Harry narrowed his eyes. He did know that voice. Not being able to identify it just made him that much more determined to guess who it was.
But what mattered a lot more than guessing who the voice belonged to was deflecting the curse that the man-yes, it was a man-launched at him a moment later. Harry did it with a countercurse that met it in midair and made the curse fade in a red sizzle.
The man laughed low and meanly. “Improved yourself a little since the last time I saw you, Potter?”
Harry didn’t waste breath asking. But he did start narrowing suspects down from his mind. This didn’t have the feeling of something coming from the Potters, for one thing. They hadn’t seen him duel, and he was sure that Aethelred hadn’t told them anything especially impressive about his performance in the classroom, not wanting to praise the man who had punished him.
“Snake eat your tongue?” the man whispered. He was waving his wand in front of him, making trails of smoke appear, and he either wasn’t incanting the spell verbally at all or was half-humming it instead. There was a droning noise, but Harry couldn’t tell if it came from his mouth or his smoke.
“Don’t think I should waste breath on you,” Harry said randomly, to see what result that produced.
The man’s back grew stiff, which Harry could see even under the concealing robe, and he said, “No, you never thought you should, did you?”
Harry wondered if it could be Voldemort, despite the fact that no one had reported a trace of Voldemort in this world since the night Severus had defeated him. To see what would happen now, he hissed, “Feeling a little lonely these days without your Death Eaters around?”
The man only laughed. “Your tricks don’t impress me, Potter.”
Harry was watching the trails of smoke, despite what might have been the man’s hope to distract him with conversation, and he saw the moment when they jerked and coalesced into a creature that looked like a distorted dragon. It sped straight towards him, aiming for the shield he’d put around his lower body.
Shield-buster, some weird variation.
Harry took a step back as if he didn’t know what to do, and then he went running forwards and launched himself into the air, over the edge of the shield, using a conjured blast of air to help himself along.
The shield-buster kept going straight ahead, not able to change its trajectory at this point, and slammed into the shield Harry had raised with a tremendous crash that rang out around the room. At the same time, the wind Harry had conjured blew back the hood of the man in front of him.
To reveal the face of an adult, furious Severus Snape.
Harry faltered despite himself as he came down, which meant that he didn’t spring off lightly as he’d meant to, but stumbled awkwardly. Snape, meanwhile, pointed his wand at the floor around Harry and incanted something in the same kind of humming drone he’d used before.
The floor came alive in a mass of writhing vines, which rose up and grabbed Harry around the waist and arms.
Harry fought grimly to hold onto his wand. If he lost that, there was going to be nothing he could do about this. And from the way the Elder Wand shone and clung to his hand, it didn’t want to be parted from him, either.
His actions were automatic, though, the same kind of thing he could imagine doing if he was a robot. His stunned gaze was still locked on Severus Snape’s face, and the-
How did this happen?
His numb wonder broke apart when Snape cast another spell with a mumble too soft for Harry to make out, and the pain of the Criuciatus abruptly seized him. It was more the unexpectedness than anything else that made Harry scream, and he lost his wand. It went flying across the room to Snape. Harry felt a moment of despair that pierced even the pain. Now Snape would be the master of the Elder Wand, and-
Snape shouted abruptly and wrung his hand. The Elder Wand had burned a smoking hole in the center of it.
Harry stared at the Elder Wand for a second. It rolled to a stop in the corner of the room, and then shimmered and disappeared. Or maybe only performed the equivalent of a Disillusionment Charm, he thought, a little dazed. There might have been a final gleam of the wood in the corner before it vanished.
Snape strode forwards and hauled Harry up by his hair. The Cruciatus had ended, and Harry sucked in gulps of air and thought about ways to survive this. He had to, for the sake of Severus and Regulus and Sirius. And Mariana. And Orion.
“How did you do that?” Snape hissed at him.
“Oh, you don’t know as much as I thought you did,” Harry said. He had assumed Snape was working with Gellert, and that Gellert at least would have reported that his wand was abnormally powerful. Harry tried to get free, jackknifing his body, but he remained in the hold of the vines, which simply tightened around him.
“If I did not need you to resurrect the world we both came from, I would kill you where you lie.”
Harry stared at him. “How did you live, when you were already dead before that timeline shattered?”
“You don’t know as much as I thought you did,” Snape said, and hit him with a Stunner from his own wand. The last thing Harry saw before he passed out was Snape’s mocking smile.
*
Seneca stood up as the Floo in his sitting room flared to life. He felt a sharp tingle of excitement race through him. He had broken through the Memory Charm that Mariana had inflicted on him several days ago, but he had invested no time in searching for her or his grandson. His grandson as he was here was weak and pathetic compared to what he had been then.
Said grandson’s ugly adult face appeared in the flames, and he nodded to Seneca. “I have secured Potter.”
“Excellent.” Seneca let through no trace of what he was thinking about Severus’s looks. “Are we ready to begin?”
“We will need a few more ingredients from your potions stores. You know the ones we spoke about in case of an emergency?”
Seneca narrowed his eyes and summoned one of the house-elves to go to the Potions cupboard and retrieve the ingredients he had laid out on the counter. “I do, yes. What sort of emergency is it?”
“Potter’s wand is an abnormally powerful one. I tried to claim it as my own, and it burned my hand and vanished as if it had Disillusioned itself. It might be used to track Potter down. I searched, but couldn’t find it. We’ll need to raise a few extra wards to keep anyone else from intruding.”
Seneca blinked. He had to admit that was a complication he had never thought of, since wands might serve new masters reluctantly but would not rebel. “All right. I should be there soon with the ingredients and the-”
Severus’s face had already vanished from the fireplace. Seneca rolled his eyes a little. For now, he had to defer to the adult version of his grandson, both because he was the one who knew the most about the ritual they would conduct and because he was the one who had freed Seneca from the mental prison Mariana had condemned him to.
But later, when the original timeline had been restored and, with it, the position of power that Severus had assured Seneca he had occupied in it…
There would be several kinds of reckonings.
*
“Daddy, Daddy, look at the funny wand!”
Orion turned around with a small frown. He was trying to make sure that more food made its way into Regulus’s mouth than down his robes-even now, he was still a messy eater-and didn’t appreciate Sirius’s distraction. But his mood changed the moment his eyes locked on the wand that had somehow rolled into the center of the dining room table.
That was Harry’s wand. He had no doubt of it. And the wand was emitting sharp red and green sparkles that lifted around it, into the air, and began to spell out letters.
Sirius reached out as if he was going to touch it. Orion snatched his son up and held him close, and not just because he wasn’t sure what the wand would do if someone else touched it right now.
HARRY TAKEN COORDINATES…
And following that was a set of Apparition coordinates that made Orion’s heart tighten. He knew exactly where that was, although only because it was a piece of land that the Black family had sold to the Princes when he was close to Sirius’s age.
And that meant Seneca Prince would be there, as well as, likely, whatever strange allies he had managed to muster. A master Legilimens who had freed his mind, at the very least. Perhaps stronger wizards.
“What is that, Orion?”
Mariana had come around the corner. Orion barely attended to her. He was staring at the burning letters, which had already begun to fade, as if the wand’s power couldn’t sustain them. He had the odd impression that that wasn’t true, that the wand could have maintained them but didn’t want to for some reason, but he had to ignore it.
The rushing in his ears, rustling and roaring, made it easy to think of other things.
He handed her Sirius and plucked the wand from the table. It throbbed once, as if getting ready to resist his grip, and then settled and did nothing else. Orion glanced at Mariana. “Harry’s in trouble. You’ll need to stay with the children.”
“Why not you?” Mariana countered immediately, the way he had expected of her.
“Do you have the battle training to shred some people who might be threatening him to pieces?” Orion asked in clipped voices, and ignored Sirius’s awed gasp from the side. He would apologize later for traumatizing his son, should it even be necessary. “And the ruthlessness to kill your husband, if it comes to that?”
Mariana bit her lip and lowered her eyes. “Only in defense of Severus.”
Orion just nodded and said, “Besides, I have the Apparition coordinates.” He stuck Harry’s wand into a holster along his arm that normally would have carried his own wand, and snatched his from the counter where he’d placed it. He would be carrying it openly into battle right now, and thus had no need of a sheath for it.
“Make sure that you return safe. You know that more people than just Sirius and Regulus depend on you and Harry.”
Orion nodded again, and used the time in which he Summoned a particular potion from his private lab to bend down and give both of his sons a hug one-armed. Sirius didn’t cling long, still seeming occupied with the idea that Orion was going to leave and kill people, but Regulus did, staring up at him.
“Where are you going, Daddy?”
“To help Mr. Harry.” Orion stood and reached for the steel flask that soared towards him, touching the cork briefly to ensure it remained in place. Then he gently detached his son’s arms and nodded to Mariana. “Stay with Mrs. Prince.”
“Okay,” Regulus said, blinking and leaning close to her. He didn’t seem to understand at all, but at the moment, Orion would take any reaction lesser than full-out screaming. He glanced at the kitchen doorway and saw little Severus standing there, staring at him.
“Tear them apart,” Severus whispered, although Orion could only tell that he had by the movement of his lips.
Orion gave him a grim smile, nodded to Mariana and his boys, and ran up the stairs to the entrance hall. The wards locked behind him with a steel clanging sound, and Orion closed his eyes and took a moment to lock the Apparition coordinates in his mind, with a similar firmness.
And a resolution that stung him like fire. Harry’s enemies would regret what they had done.
He turned on his heel with a snap and was gone.
*
Albus opened his eyes with a gasp and sat up in the bed, staring around. His hand groped and found only cool sheets where there should have been a warm body or at least lingering warmth.
“Gellert?” he called, but he knew even as he spoke that his husband wasn’t in the bathroom. The door was open and the light was off, anyway, and Gellert wasn’t the sort who would sit in a dark room brooding where he would be vulnerable to easy interruptions.
Albus stood slowly. Objectively, there should be nothing alarming in Gellert’s disappearance. He did sometimes leave to think or attend a gala or party that Albus wasn’t interested in.
Only there had been nothing like that this evening, and the behavior he’d been displaying lately meant concern was warranted.
“Izzy!” Albus called softly, his decision made.
The elf appeared in front of him, wringing her hands a little and dancing in place. “Master Gellert be making a big, big mistake,” she whispered, as if someone else was there to hear them. “He be capturing the time traveler, Master Albus! He be coming up with stupid plan that he thinks resurrect the timeline!”
Albus swallowed. The coldness that came from Gellert preferring to leave him here and reach for a broken world consumed him, and then he shoved it aside with his Occlumency and concentrated on Izzy’s words. “I don’t know where he went. But you do? Can you take me there?”
Izzy squeaked and held out her hand. “Master Albus be able to prevent Master Gellert from making the mistake!”
Albus seized her hand grimly, and something that wasn’t Apparition and wasn’t the swirling colors of a Portkey rose up around them and grabbed him.
And in his hand, the Elder Wand sang, ready for battle.
Chapter Thirty.