Chapter 317: A Lesson in Manners
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I would like to thank my beta, Awdyr, for his help in this chapter.
AN: Just in case you get confused, this is from the original Harry's POV (Earth 1), not Canon Harry. Just wanted to point that out since I said before that I was sticking to 3rd person POV, but I realized that I couldn't do that in this one.
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1st September 1995, Hogwarts (Earth 2)
Harry sighed deeply as he finally sad down in his new dormitory. Ever since he had been displaced from his universe thanks to Lily's crap, he had been planning his return. That was why he decided to come to Hogwarts in the first place. It was a nexus of magical energy and held tomes old enough to maybe even glimpse something to help with his situation. So far, all he had done was research what had happened to him.
He was making a surprising amount of headway in that regard. His Arcane Hearing was activated during the incident underneath Durmstrang, and he had heard a good part of what had happened. Now, he only needed to reproduce it while being as consistent as possible. Which meant translating what happened into some kind of arithmancy formula, and crafting a ritual or a spell to mimic it.
The ingredients were simple enough. A broken prophecy, a singularity in space and time, and the dark energy released from his family crest. And, of course, a fuck-ton of energy.
Yeah, things were progressing but not as quickly as he would have liked. Who knew that finding a way to travel between universes would be so difficult?
To be perfectly honest, he had pulled an all-nighter just before going to Hogwarts, trying to get as much done before being subjected to teen drama once more. Harry had done his best to cultivate a bit of a no-nonsense reputation back in his school, but unfortunately, it didn't follow him here.
When he had taken a nap in one of the empty compartments, he had been surprised to wake up at the sight of his counterpart and a shy Neville Longbottom. It was pretty jarring seeing the confident tone wilt with every look Harry gave him. His counterpart wasn't really all that better, just filled with anger, resentment, and frustration.
To be fair, he had just seen Diggory get killed and then spent months without any form of support.
But Harry couldn't help but curse his luck. Why did it have to be them?
He had planned on being relatively close to the boy, because of the prophecy and everything, and the fact that he still had that scar on his forehead. That was the Horcrux he had no idea how to get out, aside from, of course, getting the boy hit with a killing curse by Voldemort. It had worked for the stories, somehow.
Anyway, he had begun to regret slightly his decision to come to Hogwarts. He had to be sorted in front of everyone. At least, they sorted him before the first years. That would have been pretty embarrassing.
He had chosen to go to Gryffindor. Well, he cast a small compulsion for the hat to yell 'Gryffindor' while using the cloak to hide himself from it. The hat never really knew that he was on anyone's head.
It was a nice tricky use of an aspect of the cloak, one that he explored after Daphne told him about Lily's adaptation of the Veela's allure as a compulsion charm. Magic simply could not find his mind, using the same way that it couldn't detect him when he walked through wards.
After all, he couldn't have the Sorting Hat blabbing to people about his true nature, especially not Dumbledore.
This was what brought him to the Gryffindor common room, and his current regret to choosing this house. He was sitting in one of the chairs, writing in his journals, trying to progress even further with his calculations.
This was very hard to do because of the yelling match between his counterpart and Seamus Finnigan. He released a deep breath and just cast a silencing charm, which made the yelling disappear. He conjured a bit of music to calm himself down and continued working.
It seemed to have worked for a little while until Hermione Granger decided to break the charm. Harry winced at the sudden rise of noise and gave her an annoyed look, "What is it?"
"You're not allowed to cast privacy charms in the common room," she replied with a superior look.
Harry simply rolled his eyes, "You're also not allowed to yell at each other. I don't see you harassing Potter."
"Ron calmed them down," the muggleborn continued, "Harry has been having a bit of a temper ever since the Daily Prophet started calling him a liar."
"Meh, this rag would print anything, really. I haven't really read it to get any news for a while."
"So, you believe Harry then?" she asked with a hopeful tone.
"I don't really care one way or the other. After this year, I'm leaving the country anyway. You-Know-Who never really left Britain, so whether he's back or not is kinda irrelevant."
She obviously wanted to say something but stopped herself. She was about to leave, until she, unfortunately, took a small peak at what he was writing in his journal, "Oh, is that arithmancy? It looks pretty advanced."
"It is pretty advanced and also private."
"Oh, come on. I could help you. I'm in first place in arithmancy and it's my favourite class. Even if the homework is a bit much. It would be a very nice training exercise before we go to class tomorrow."
"I'm not registered for arithmancy, Hermione."
That seemed to stun the muggleborn, and she gave him an outraged look, "Why not?"
"Because I don't need to. I'm here because I need to be registered at Hogwarts to apply for my OWLS. And I only need an OWL in charms, transfiguration, and defence against the dark arts, to be able to apply for a license to practice magic before being seventeen. I only have to attend my core classes, nothing more."
"You're not staying past your OWLS?"
Harry shrugged, "I'm not planning on it."
"But you could learn so much, Harrold, and become a better wizard if you take your electives."
"Honestly, Hermoine, I don't think I can really learn any arithmancy from your year. No offence, but I'm a little more advanced than you are."
The muggleborn wouldn't be sated, "I'm telling McGonagall. She's bound to set you straight."
"And I'll tell her that I'm already struggling with my courseload and that the big bad prefect Hermione Granger, wants to force more work on me. Now that wouldn't be a good look, would it? She might even take your badge."
She grabbed her prefect badge as if it would disappear before glaring at him, "This isn't over!" and walked away.
Harry snorted. Hermione Granger was really the same in both dimensions. At least, this would have been what he imagined she would have been like if the Diary fiasco didn't happen. Deciding that he didn't want to get up to the dormitory to hear another spat between his counterpart and Finnigan, he activated the cloak and phased out of the Fat Lady's portrait.
His destination was a pretty obvious one. He needed the prophecy to be broken and he could do it in two obvious ways. Either he killed Voldemort, or he killed his counterpart, and he leaned more towards killing the mass-murdering psychopath than the angsty teen.
That meant killing Voldemort, and to do so, he needed to destroy the Horcrux. He already destroyed the ring during the summer. It was simply enough sneaking in and destroying it with the Basilisk fang he still carried on him since his departure from Hogwarts in his home dimension. He never really bothered to put it back after destroying the Cup of Hufflepuff, something that he was thankful for now.
Still, in this case, he recast the curse on the ring and added a small illusion to make anyone think that it was still a Horcrux. It could still be useful in some other way. And it wasn't like he needed it; he still had one of his own.
Now, in terms of Horcruxes, the Diary and the Ring were gone. The Diadem would be before the next day. There were only four left, the locket, the cup, Nagini, and his counterpart's scar.
Funnily enough, the Horcrux in Gringotts was the least guarded of them. The locket was under Fidelius Charm, Nagini was always at Voldemort's side, and the scar kinda belonged to an innocent guy who was constantly under Dumbledore's surveillance.
His train of thought was broken when he arrived at the Room of Requirements. He released his cloak's power to allow the room to see him and walked three times, asking for the Room of Hidden Things.
It had taken less than fifteen minutes in total to find a diadem and destroy it with his Basilisk fang. Sure, there was a loud scream and a discharge of magic, but they were easily contained.
Harry honestly had no idea why anyone would ever create those things. Sure, no one else had his Arcane Hearing and couldn't hear how horrifying it was. But there was still a sense of wrongness emanating from the artefact.
Anyway, Harry returned back in the dormitory, having disappeared for around thirty minutes at most, which he used to destroy one of Voldemort's Horcruxes.
No one had even noticed that he was gone.
When he had gotten back to the dormitory, Finnigan and his counterpart were still fighting, and Harry just cast another privacy charm to finally fall asleep.
Harry awoke when the sun rose. He was always an early riser and went to have his breakfast. He hadn't gotten out of the common room until his counterpart interrupted him, "Hey, Harrold!"
He turned towards him, "Yeah?"
"McGonagall asked me to show you around since Ron and Hermione are busy with the first years. She also told me that we shouldn't have any classes until noon, so we could take our time. I think our first class is Defence with that Umbridge woman. We'll get our timetables later. You're pretty lucky; I don't think anyone in the castle bar Dumbledore and the Weasley Twins knows the castle as well as I do. First, I'm going to give you a small tour of our classrooms and then we'll move on from there."
And so began Harry's torture at the hand of his counterpart. To be honest, Harry wasn't exactly being fair; it was hard to make a tour of the castle interesting to someone who studied there for three years. He didn't really count the fourth since he was in foreign schools for the tournament during that time.
Still, his counterpart was weirdly excited about the tour, which was really weird. Harry just kept humming and nodding at everything, wanting to get everything over with as quickly as possible.
It was when they got to the dungeons that he was asked, "You believe me, right? About Voldemort."
"Well, you do have a bit of evidence supporting you, like the ministry not handling the investigation into Diggory's death properly, and the fact that you were obviously injured during the third task. There's also the fact that no body was found when he attacked your home. You could be telling the truth, or you could be lying. In the end, it doesn't really matter, at least not anytime soon that is."
"How could that not matter? Voldemort is back. There's going to be a war."
Harry simply shrugged, unperturbed by the boy's rising temper, "There are always wars. But I didn't say that it wouldn't matter in the long run, just not in the next year. If the Dark Lord is back, then his hiding is his strongest weapon yet. He needs to strengthen his numbers again and that takes time. He'll want to prepare a decapitation strike and try to take out all of his opposition at once. That kind of thing would require at least two to three years and even then, he'll need to break out his most talented followers from Azkaban first. No one really wants it to be known. The ministry wants to wallow in a comfortable lie and the Dark Lord wants to have no issues recruiting his new army. You need to stop looking at it like a fight and think of things from a logistics standpoint. It's how you'll understand everyone's moves and motives."
Harry's counterpart didn't really have any time to react as a loud annoying voice interrupted him, "Oh, Potty, Potty. What are you doing in the dungeons so early in the morning? Are you spying on us?"
"Fuck off, ferret boy," the boy simply retorted.
The blond boy was standing surrounded by what seemed to be the Slytherin Quidditch team, Crabbe and Goyle. Other than their intimidating stature, they weren't exactly threats, magically speaking.
"Now you're just being rude here, Potty. After all, you're the one trying to sneak into our common room. That means we can defend ourselves, can't we?"
"We're not anywhere near your common room!" he exclaimed.
"Now, now, only someone who tried to break into our common room would know where it is. This is just us defending ourselves, right?"
Deciding that enough was enough, Harry raised his hand, "Now, now. I know you're all pretty excited to see Potter here and probably have some kind of justified vendetta against him. Unfortunately for you gentlemen, we're on a bit of a tour of the castle here. So, can you wait until we're done before continuing your little spat? It would be greatly appreciated."
That seemed to have stunned everyone. Both Malfoy and his counterpart were staring at him as he suddenly grew a second head. Marcus Flint, just growled at him, "You should go."
His counterpart nodded, "You really should. They're already being nice since they didn't just attack you too, especially after you embarrassed Malfoy on the Express."
Harry rolled his eyes and prepared to leave the corridor. That was, of course, until Malfoy spoke up, "Yeah don't worry, you can have Potter back for your little orphan club in no time. He'll be alright after a little time in the hospital room, probably. Not that anyone will care if something did happen. No one will miss him. or you for that matter. Must be so difficult to be all alone in the world."
He was right at the door when the blond boy said that. He rolled his eyes. Seriously making fun of an orphan? It was just so sad.
Giant wooden doors suddenly materialized at each end of the corridor and slammed shut, trapping them all inside. Harry spoke without facing them, "Manners maketh man."
"Do you know what it means?" he asked after turning.
They looked at him, their wands raised, confused, and he smirked at them, "Then let me teach you a lesson."
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AN: I had a bit of fun on that one, especially near the end, and I'm excited to write the confrontation properly, and the next DADA lesson with Umbridge... I wanted this chapter to act as an update on what Harry achieved so far and a bit about his plan, and I hope it achieved that. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
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If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.