Categories > Books > Harry Potter > Unlikely
Awakening and Rude Shock
0 reviewsHarry, of Ravenclaw House, finds himself not where he belongs.
0Predictable
A/N I wasn't expecting such fast response, honestly. In light of that, I'm sending out chapter two a little bit early. On the other hand I still have an overall schedule to keep to; while updates will ordinarily be every week chapter three will be an exception, updating two weeks from now instead.
And now, without further ado, I do present to you, lords and ladies, the power and ruler of Britain, Headmaster Riddle...
Chapter two: Awakening & Rude Shocks
April 6th, 1997
Harry concentrated on steadying his breathing first of all. Occlumency was as much magic as it was technique, but like one could make a passable exercise routine out of dueling practice, so too were there some non-magical applications for occlumency.
He wasn't where he should be, which was… anywhere but here. The dorm was all yellow and brown and, well, it was the girl's dorm. And he was a girl himself. That had been a shock, but it had been tabled in favor of running down an analysis.
His experiment had obviously gotten results.
Said results were not what he expected.
He could infer that rather than copy and pluck knowledge in a tidy packet like he had wanted, the whole mind had been taken. And then his had been forced out, maybe, because a brain only had room enough for one mind. And it ended up in the vacated body or something?
He didn't know. That would be an interesting problem to sort out later. What mattered was that he wasn't dead, which meant that he still had a chance of fixing this. And, if Harry was going to be honest with himself, his double— his female double, he noted again in astonishment— was doing better in his place than he had. As far as he could tell the spell hadn't failed so much as it had worked too well and grabbed her whole mind, so there wasn't any reason to doubt that his body was currently being ridden by someone with prior experience in killing Voldemorts.
Which meant that he needed to focus on what was happening here. It wouldn't do to cause a panic, and if he were found out before he could figure out how to handle the situation then the other Harry's friends might assume the worst and take him to be a Polyjuice impersonator or something more heinous.
Luckily, Headmaster Snape— and Dumbledore before him— had given Harry instruction in legilimency. If he played it safe then he could take reads on expected behavior and figure out an excuse— sickness, he thought, but nothing so serious as to warrant a trip to Pomfrey or whoever was in her place here— for why he was more distant than people here would expected.
Or maybe he'd be lucky and his double was an introvert.
Lights started going on as the morning broke and students began waking up.
"Good morning, Harry!" someone yelled at him from a few beds down, a black-haired girl that he didn't recognize. She certainly wasn't shy.
Harry nodded weakly, playing at a hint of nausea. He caught eye contact with her briefly before turning away and learned that her name was Fay Dunbar. And that Hogwarts apparently didn't train in the Mind Arts. That had been a risk he needed to take, but by the shape of her mind it didn't seem as if she had even heard of such things.
Or that she was the greatest Occlumens that Harry had ever met, but after he was dressed he made quick eye contact with a couple of other girls on his way to the Great Hall and got the same results. The possibility had been absurd, but it was comforting to have confirmation.
All warm feelings fled out of him when he entered the Great Hall, however, and he forced himself to keep walking to his table. Deliberately, but in what he hoped was not at all a suspicious manner, he refrained from looking in the direction of the staff.
He trained his eyes instead on the food in front of him, as bountiful as it was back home, and that seemed to be doing him fine until he bit into a croissant and found a slip of parchment tucked inside.
My dear young friend,
I would be remiss in my duties if there were an empty seat in your uncle's class after breakfast, but there appears to be a free period thereafter. Make yourself present in my office at that time.
Your thoughts are the only password you will need, as always.
T. M. Riddle, it signed off with a flourish.
Her uncle? She had an uncle here?
Still, unexpected family relations notwithstanding, this wasn't good. Voldemort hadn't been killed, he'd won here. And early on, by the looks of it. He still appeared perfectly human, if clad in as many scars as Harry remembered from old photos of Mad-Eye Moody.
He ditched breakfast soon after that and avoided whatever unknown class had been scheduled for him. Wandering the halls seemed safer than frantically legilimizing a family relation every five seconds to avoid letting his identity slip.
Nobody seemed to pay attention to the sixteen-year-old girl making her way in this direction, or that one, but purposefully, and Harry felt that maybe he could figure something out. Explain away his absence with the sickness he'd been faking this morning. He was sure that he couldn't stand up to the mental assault of any universe's Voldemort and it was possible that Voldemort had already caught a whiff of something.
As his thoughts dwelled ever more on the encroaching meeting, the halls slowly became hazy. Like viewing through a cloudy glass, his surroundings took on a warped appearance. A door appeared before him, in front of him no matter where he turned.
"Your thoughts are the only password you will need," Harry whispered to himself. He didn't know what enchantment or spell of the wards this was, but he caught on to its effect and tried, desperately, to think of anything but Voldemort and his office and their meeting.
The door continued to develop clarity and then it opened up to reveal Voldemort standing behind his desk. He was a little bit taller than Harry remembered from pensieve memories, but there could have been any number of reasons for that. It was almost as if he had been stretched out an inch, too little to look very different but just enough to appear, in all his details, just slightly wrong.
His hands were held together, slightly-too-long fingers wrapped around each other. His mouth was open, a toothsome smile that was almost too sharp.
Suddenly Harry realized that he was not outside the office, looking through the door, but inside it, sitting in the chair opposite Voldemort.
And it was so cold.
"Good morning, Nymphadora. Hot chocolate?" Voldemort raised a mug and gave a smile as sharp as a razor.
Harry focused on the mug. "Yes. That would be perfect." He held it in both of his hands but, as nonchalantly as he thought he could make the action look, did not drink. There was no telling what Voldemort had put in it. "Thank you, Headmaster Riddle."
And why was Voldemort using that name? Hadn't he hated it? Or was "Headmaster Voldemort" simply too strange for even him?
Harry had turned his eyes to examine the many books all around the office in an attempt to look at anything but Voldemort. Gradually, though, he noticed that there was silence in the room, and with trepidation he turned his gaze back to face Voldemort.
"You did not call me Tom," he said.
Harry's mouth fell open. "I…"
Something predatory flashed across Voldemort's face. "What have you done with my student?"
"I beg your pardon?" Harry replied. The words started to spill out. "Look, I-I'm sick, I'm sorry, it's just not a very good day for me Tom, I mean, I feel like I'm going to throw up all over the place and I tried some potions and it didn't help me any—"
Voldemort cut him off with a silencio. "I am very familiar with Miss Harriett Potter. How she moves when she is lying. Or how her voice hitches just so when she is nervous, as you are right now. But most of all," he snarled, "and in no small part because of these replacement games that she likes to play when Nymphadora visits Hogwarts, I am familiar with the difference between the real thing and an imposter unfamiliar with her body and how it moves. She is more graceful than you."
Harry swallowed. Tried to say something, then realized that he couldn't.
"You appear unwilling to talk right now." Voldemort sneered. "So we will adjourn for now, and reunite when I have decided to make you beg to answer my questions."
As if his body was no longer under his control, and it likely wasn't at the moment, Harry left his seat and walked away.
"Oh, and my fine, thieving friend?"
Harry stopped.
"Don't think that the wards will let you pass the walls of this castle again, even if you find one of its innumerable secret passages."
And now, without further ado, I do present to you, lords and ladies, the power and ruler of Britain, Headmaster Riddle...
Chapter two: Awakening & Rude Shocks
April 6th, 1997
Harry concentrated on steadying his breathing first of all. Occlumency was as much magic as it was technique, but like one could make a passable exercise routine out of dueling practice, so too were there some non-magical applications for occlumency.
He wasn't where he should be, which was… anywhere but here. The dorm was all yellow and brown and, well, it was the girl's dorm. And he was a girl himself. That had been a shock, but it had been tabled in favor of running down an analysis.
His experiment had obviously gotten results.
Said results were not what he expected.
He could infer that rather than copy and pluck knowledge in a tidy packet like he had wanted, the whole mind had been taken. And then his had been forced out, maybe, because a brain only had room enough for one mind. And it ended up in the vacated body or something?
He didn't know. That would be an interesting problem to sort out later. What mattered was that he wasn't dead, which meant that he still had a chance of fixing this. And, if Harry was going to be honest with himself, his double— his female double, he noted again in astonishment— was doing better in his place than he had. As far as he could tell the spell hadn't failed so much as it had worked too well and grabbed her whole mind, so there wasn't any reason to doubt that his body was currently being ridden by someone with prior experience in killing Voldemorts.
Which meant that he needed to focus on what was happening here. It wouldn't do to cause a panic, and if he were found out before he could figure out how to handle the situation then the other Harry's friends might assume the worst and take him to be a Polyjuice impersonator or something more heinous.
Luckily, Headmaster Snape— and Dumbledore before him— had given Harry instruction in legilimency. If he played it safe then he could take reads on expected behavior and figure out an excuse— sickness, he thought, but nothing so serious as to warrant a trip to Pomfrey or whoever was in her place here— for why he was more distant than people here would expected.
Or maybe he'd be lucky and his double was an introvert.
Lights started going on as the morning broke and students began waking up.
"Good morning, Harry!" someone yelled at him from a few beds down, a black-haired girl that he didn't recognize. She certainly wasn't shy.
Harry nodded weakly, playing at a hint of nausea. He caught eye contact with her briefly before turning away and learned that her name was Fay Dunbar. And that Hogwarts apparently didn't train in the Mind Arts. That had been a risk he needed to take, but by the shape of her mind it didn't seem as if she had even heard of such things.
Or that she was the greatest Occlumens that Harry had ever met, but after he was dressed he made quick eye contact with a couple of other girls on his way to the Great Hall and got the same results. The possibility had been absurd, but it was comforting to have confirmation.
All warm feelings fled out of him when he entered the Great Hall, however, and he forced himself to keep walking to his table. Deliberately, but in what he hoped was not at all a suspicious manner, he refrained from looking in the direction of the staff.
He trained his eyes instead on the food in front of him, as bountiful as it was back home, and that seemed to be doing him fine until he bit into a croissant and found a slip of parchment tucked inside.
My dear young friend,
I would be remiss in my duties if there were an empty seat in your uncle's class after breakfast, but there appears to be a free period thereafter. Make yourself present in my office at that time.
Your thoughts are the only password you will need, as always.
T. M. Riddle, it signed off with a flourish.
Her uncle? She had an uncle here?
Still, unexpected family relations notwithstanding, this wasn't good. Voldemort hadn't been killed, he'd won here. And early on, by the looks of it. He still appeared perfectly human, if clad in as many scars as Harry remembered from old photos of Mad-Eye Moody.
He ditched breakfast soon after that and avoided whatever unknown class had been scheduled for him. Wandering the halls seemed safer than frantically legilimizing a family relation every five seconds to avoid letting his identity slip.
Nobody seemed to pay attention to the sixteen-year-old girl making her way in this direction, or that one, but purposefully, and Harry felt that maybe he could figure something out. Explain away his absence with the sickness he'd been faking this morning. He was sure that he couldn't stand up to the mental assault of any universe's Voldemort and it was possible that Voldemort had already caught a whiff of something.
As his thoughts dwelled ever more on the encroaching meeting, the halls slowly became hazy. Like viewing through a cloudy glass, his surroundings took on a warped appearance. A door appeared before him, in front of him no matter where he turned.
"Your thoughts are the only password you will need," Harry whispered to himself. He didn't know what enchantment or spell of the wards this was, but he caught on to its effect and tried, desperately, to think of anything but Voldemort and his office and their meeting.
The door continued to develop clarity and then it opened up to reveal Voldemort standing behind his desk. He was a little bit taller than Harry remembered from pensieve memories, but there could have been any number of reasons for that. It was almost as if he had been stretched out an inch, too little to look very different but just enough to appear, in all his details, just slightly wrong.
His hands were held together, slightly-too-long fingers wrapped around each other. His mouth was open, a toothsome smile that was almost too sharp.
Suddenly Harry realized that he was not outside the office, looking through the door, but inside it, sitting in the chair opposite Voldemort.
And it was so cold.
"Good morning, Nymphadora. Hot chocolate?" Voldemort raised a mug and gave a smile as sharp as a razor.
Harry focused on the mug. "Yes. That would be perfect." He held it in both of his hands but, as nonchalantly as he thought he could make the action look, did not drink. There was no telling what Voldemort had put in it. "Thank you, Headmaster Riddle."
And why was Voldemort using that name? Hadn't he hated it? Or was "Headmaster Voldemort" simply too strange for even him?
Harry had turned his eyes to examine the many books all around the office in an attempt to look at anything but Voldemort. Gradually, though, he noticed that there was silence in the room, and with trepidation he turned his gaze back to face Voldemort.
"You did not call me Tom," he said.
Harry's mouth fell open. "I…"
Something predatory flashed across Voldemort's face. "What have you done with my student?"
"I beg your pardon?" Harry replied. The words started to spill out. "Look, I-I'm sick, I'm sorry, it's just not a very good day for me Tom, I mean, I feel like I'm going to throw up all over the place and I tried some potions and it didn't help me any—"
Voldemort cut him off with a silencio. "I am very familiar with Miss Harriett Potter. How she moves when she is lying. Or how her voice hitches just so when she is nervous, as you are right now. But most of all," he snarled, "and in no small part because of these replacement games that she likes to play when Nymphadora visits Hogwarts, I am familiar with the difference between the real thing and an imposter unfamiliar with her body and how it moves. She is more graceful than you."
Harry swallowed. Tried to say something, then realized that he couldn't.
"You appear unwilling to talk right now." Voldemort sneered. "So we will adjourn for now, and reunite when I have decided to make you beg to answer my questions."
As if his body was no longer under his control, and it likely wasn't at the moment, Harry left his seat and walked away.
"Oh, and my fine, thieving friend?"
Harry stopped.
"Don't think that the wards will let you pass the walls of this castle again, even if you find one of its innumerable secret passages."
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