Intercession by VigoGrimborne

Summary:

Dropped off in a different dimension, different time, and different country, and handed an 'optimal' baby, Taylor Hebert gets to enjoy her retirement. Harry Hebert is a perfectly happy, normal child. What could possibly go wrong?

A crossover between Worm and Harry Potter, featuring Post-GM Taylor and initially pre-canon Harry, and following the many plot butterflies that result.

Chapter 1

Notes:

Chapter Text

Intercession

A Worm / Harry Potter crossover

Taylor had expected death. An end. To be put down, a dangerous attack dog who had finally outlived her usefulness and developed a case of rabies in the process.

She hadn't fought it.

And yet, when she next woke, decidedly not dead, she found that she very much did not want to die after all… and it seemed someone else felt the same.

She came to in a hospital bed, one that seemed to be situated in a totally normal, if somewhat old-fashioned hospital. She was hooked up to something that looked a bit like a dialysis machine, but with extra parts attached, and Contessa was plugging in another bag of dark-colored blood.

Contessa looked over at her. "Ask," she said neutrally.

"What are you doing?" Taylor rasped.

"Exchanging your blood for someone else's, and using Tinkertech to change your body accordingly," Contessa answered.

"Why?" Taylor tried to reach for the IV bag, but it was on the side of her missing arm, so she ended up just waving the stump that remained of her upper arm. Her powers were absent, leaving her mostly helpless for the moment.

"Part of the Path," Contessa said, as if that was all Taylor needed to know. She plugged another little bag into the machine, and the world fuzzed before Taylor's eyes, fading to black with an alarming speed.

Some time later, still missing an arm but otherwise feeling wonderful and oddly light-headed, Taylor once again found herself in the same old-fashioned hospital room, this time without any obvious Tinkertech hooked up to her.

Contessa was there, but she was missing her usual fedora and instead wearing a nurse's outfit.

Also, she was holding a sleeping baby.

"Listen carefully," Contessa told her. "This is an entirely normal world. No powers, no entities, no knowledge that either ever existed. I am going to leave you here, and no parahuman will ever return to this dimension."

So it was to be exile, then. An upgrade from execution, at least. Taylor tried to cross her arms and scowled when she was once again reminded that she only had one.

"You will find paperwork establishing your existence on the chair behind me," Contessa continued. "Personal identification, a document trail under your real name as a British citizen with deceased parents, tax records, all of that. A deed to a small house in a nearby town, and the keys to a used car that is currently parked in the driveway there. There's enough money in the house to last you a year. Legally, you have always existed in this world, and all documentation associated with that is in place."

Taylor spared a moment to contemplate exactly how fucked she would be if she didn't have all of that, but was still stranded in a new world. Perhaps not entirely fucked, but at least halfway there, at minimum. "I'll take it."

"You will," Contessa agreed. "You are here in this hospital as the aftermath of being struck by a car. Your arm needed to be amputated. You have a medical history, but that, your current visual prescription, and childbirth are the only things on it."

"Childbirth." She might still be on some sort of medication, because she couldn't will up more than a mild curiosity as to why that made the list when all of her old injuries – concussions, back-alley surgery to remove metal fused inside the shoulder socket, temporary bisection – for some reason didn't make the cut. She hadn't given birth, but she had been cut in half. She understood omitting the latter, but why lie about the former?

"Your son according to all governmental records." Contessa held the child out to show her. "Harry."

"You stole a baby to give to me." She was definitely on something strong, because that seemed eminently reasonable. Why not go all the way when forging a fake identity? It would be hard to prove she was an interdimensional refugee when there were records of her giving birth here at least a year before she arrived, and a child to go along with the paperwork.

"The Path specifically directed me to picking this child up from where it was abandoned on a porch in the middle of the night," Contessa explained. "This child is optimal for ensuring you never attempt to leave this dimension, or to you being happy here. Or both."

"Okay. Fine." Her new identity included an optimized baby. Okay. That made sense. "Anything… else?"

"No. The Path ends with this explanation. I will leave the baby with you, suggest you wait to leave until they wean you off the painkillers so that the Tinkertech drugs are fully flushed from your system, and then I will deconstruct the means by which I reached this dimension and leave."

"I knew it." She was on drugs. That was the only reason suddenly having a new life, in a new country, in a new dimension, with a baby she had never seen before in her life seemed in any way reasonable. "Don't… Don't let the door hit you. On the way out."

"You managed to succeed where Cauldron failed." Contessa walked over to her bedside and gently set the baby boy in Taylor's lap. "You cannot go back. Only forward. Enjoy living."

"Sure." She looked down at the sleeping child.

Black hair. Pale skin. A cute little green onesie. An odd lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

When she looked up, Contessa was gone.

She was pretty sure she was going to appreciate being drugged for this conversation in retrospect, because at the moment she felt pretty good about how things were turning out, and that was probably going to be a rare feeling when she was lucid.

It was nice to have a moment of peace before everything went to hell again.

Raising a child was difficult. The diapers, the feeding, the crying, the sleeplessness, doing it all on her own with one arm…

Contessa had not baby-proofed the furniture.

Taylor worked with packing tape and extra diapers, blunting every sharp edge she could find. Awkwardly, with only one hand available, and all the while keeping one eye on the baby crawling around on the carpet in the living room.

She had come home – this place was her home now – from the hospital, driven back by a taxi – the nurse had called it a 'minicab' – and dropped off in her new house's driveway just as the sun set behind it. Harry was hungry, she had to figure out what he was able to eat, she had to set up the crib, and she still had to go find a grocery store to stock the bare cupboards. All before it got too late for any stores to be open.

Harry shrieked, and she dropped the diapers and tape as she spun around, but he was just shrieking to himself, for no particular reason.

Baby-proofing came first, because she didn't know if Harry could walk yet and the last thing she needed was her new baby bashing his brains out on a coffee table because the extradimensional alien somehow forgot to foresee baby-proofing the furniture as essential.

Her stomach growled at her. Her head hurt. Harry was going to start crying soon, if she didn't get him something edible. She didn't even know what he had eaten for lunch; a nurse handled that while the doctors were giving her the last dose of unnecessary painkillers. She didn't know if a real mother would have let a nurse take her year-old son away to feed him out of sight.

She didn't know how to do any of this, and another thing Contessa had not provided was a how-to manual.

Little Harry did a wonderful job of keeping Taylor from dwelling on what she had lost, mainly by virtue of running her ragged.

The house – three bedrooms, one bathroom, a cozy little place in a suburb an hour's drive from London – was strewn with dirty clothing and take-out boxes for the first two months, and Taylor rarely left except to buy supplies. Her car was in good condition, but driving on the other side of the road took some getting used to, and driving without the aid of her powers in sensing the condition of traffic two blocks and a corner away took more adjustment.

Her power was mostly gone.

Mostly.

Some days she felt like the divide between her current state and her power coming back was a wall of cardboard. Like she just had to push, somehow, in a dimension she couldn't see or feel, and it would be back.

Harry wasn't where she had left him.

Two minutes to use the bathroom; that was all. He hadn't moved from his spot on the floor for half an hour, lining up toy blocks and then moving them into a new line. He could sit still for another two minutes. She was ten steps and a door she hadn't even bothered closing away from him.

But when she came back, he was gone.

Her head hurt, even though the momentary panic. It felt like something was buzzing in her skull, an insistent push. Temptation.

If she had her bugs, she would be able to keep track of him from anywhere in the house.

But she didn't have her bugs, her headache failed to reopen any old wounds or old connections, and Harry's burbling laughter led her to the kitchen, where he was trying and failing to walk more than a few steps before falling on the – thankfully – thick safety carpet she had put over the tile floor.

She snatched him up with her good arm, feeling protective despite him being in no danger at all, and took him back to the living room.

"Mama," he said, pushing at her arm. "Down!"

She set him down, her momentary panic if not forgotten then at least buried. Next time, she was going to put a mirror in the hallway so she could keep an eye on the living room from the bathroom. Or just put him in his crib.

Her headache remained for most of the day, but it didn't come to anything. She neither expected nor wanted it to.

Most days even that phantom pain was absent, and she was normal. A normal single mother with an abnormal handicap and a very, very active son.

It was an adjustment. A big one. But she wasn't completely oblivious when it came to children, there was a public library with books on parenting nearby, and Harry wasn't that bad as babies went. She muddled along, slowly gaining her footing with every passing day.

Toast popped up in the toaster. Scrambled eggs sizzled in the pan. Taylor took a plate from a stack in the cabinet under the counter, set it down, and quickly seized the spatula to dish up some eggs.

Harry toddled by, precariously placing every step. He saw her legs and latched on, using her to hold himself up. She took his surprisingly dense weight in stride, pulled the pan off the burner, dropped her spatula in the sink for later, and flicked the knob to turn the burner off, all in rapid, practiced succession.

Then she reached over, grabbed a banana from a bunch she had left out on the counter overnight, and snapped it off to hand to Harry. "Here," she said.

He smiled and took it, letting go of her leg to sit down right behind her and pull at the peel. He probably wouldn't get it open, or if he did the insides would be shapeless mush, but he could eat that just as well and she had other food for him.

Momentarily freed of his encumbrance, she stepped over him to open the refrigerator, took out the milk, and then stepped back to take the toast and drop it on her plate.

All without a single dropped item, burned hand, or startled toddler. Breakfast was served.

She was getting the hang of all of this.

Harry turned two in April, according to his possibly incorrect paperwork, and she realized that she didn't know when her own birthday was. This world was thirty-some years behind her own, and Contessa had dropped her off at a completely different time of year, meaning it wasn't an even difference in years. Adding in that she had no idea how long, chronologically, had passed while she was in Contessa's custody…

She decided to just celebrate her own birthday on the day her birth certificate said it was, June first. By that same measure she was twenty-three.

She celebrated by finding a daycare for Harry and going job hunting. A temporary position working in a library was first, intended as a stepping stone to keep the bills paid while she looked for better work. The library was close and she knew the librarians from her time spent brooding over parenting books.

"You'll only be shelving books to start," the old woman in charge of the library staff told her. "Irwin will teach you the system, it couldn't be simpler. I expect full productivity from you, one arm or not, you understand?"

"I'll do my best." She wasn't certain she liked her new boss, but nothing was holding her to this job except the need to fund the rest of her life. Shelving books didn't pay highly enough that she would be devastated to see it go if she couldn't deal with the people involved.

Irwin was a young man who broke all of the 'old lady librarian' stereotypes their boss fulfilled, though he was wearing a very ugly sweater that made Taylor wonder whether there was a dress code she was exceeding with her normal, serviceable pants and blouse.

"Don't mind Irma, she's retiring next year," Irwin told her as he led her into the back room. "Here," he indicated a slot in the wall with a big bin under it, "is the book return. Your job is to get the books from here to the shelves after checking them in and examining them for damage." He took a paperback from the bin and tossed it onto a table, presumably to demonstrate. "I've heard word of fancy sorting systems, but here we still do it the old-fashioned way."

Having grown up more than a decade in the future of this current timeline, Taylor had expected their process would seem old-fashioned to her even if it was cutting-edge. "Works for me."

"You take the book by the spine," Irwin demonstrated, picking the book up again. "One hand on top and bottom of the spine, hold it up, then fan the pages out with your other hand…" He glanced at her, mid-inspection of the book. "Or, if you've got something in your other hand, just flip it over and shake it out, we're only looking for gunk, stuck pages, or ripped pages, nothing fancy," he concluded.

"I can do that." She demonstrated for him, taking a book from the bin to flick open. It was awkward, but everything was awkward at first with one hand. This wouldn't be any different.

"Next we check it in, take it to the scanner," he continued.

His enthusiasm wasn't at all infectious, but they were the only ones in this back room and the library itself was mostly empty. As far as jobs went, this would be a good one for easing back into a society she had in truth never been part of in the first place.

It wasn't a bad job, even if she was stuck reshelving books and dealing with the occasional bout of old-lady spite from Irma. Quiet, no real pressure, no customer service or waiting tables or hunting down homicidal serial killers to save the world. The hours matched neatly with the hours covered by Harry's new daycare, too.

When she was offered a promotion to a less drudgeworthy position by Irma's more agreeable replacement, she took it and stopped hunting for better jobs. The salary was modest, but aside from the ever-present money pit that Harry represented she didn't have much to spend on, so she didn't mind.

Harry turned three, and she realized that she hadn't thought of Earth Bet in at least a week. Not that Harry knew or cared.

She turned twenty-four, according to her records, and was thrown a little surprise party by the other librarians. Her reaction to being jumpscared when she walked into work was… Not minor. Nobody was hurt, thankfully.

She considered going to therapy, but in the end that seemed more likely to open up a new can of worms than actually help.

'Hello,' she imagined herself saying, 'I'd like to sign up for therapy.'

'For what?' she imagined her therapist asking, or asking something that amounted to the same thing.

And then what?

She lay in bed late at night, contemplating the thorny little problem her circumstances forced on her.

Nothing was wrong, per se. Her life was on track, Harry was a mostly happy toddler who was only just starting to demonstrate what 'the terrible twos' referred to. Her job was tolerable. She wasn't a bundle of lethal nerves and paranoia.

Maybe a little paranoid and nervous, but not so bad it was crippling her.

But she wasn't okay. Couldn't be, not after everything that had happened. Now that she had a steady source of income and some time when Harry was at day care every day, she could theoretically go get professional help.

If only her problems were things she didn't have to lie about.

'I was in a gang war,' she imagined saying instead of telling the truth. Or 'I'm in witness protection after fighting organized crime.' Or just 'I hurt people, and I was hurt, and I want to make sure I'm not going to hurt anyone else by accident.'

The more vague her excuse, the more likely her therapist was to pry and poke. That was their job, or at least part of it. To understand her problems so they could help her cope. The more specific she made it, the more likely they would catch her in inconsistencies.

At its core, her problem was that she didn't think she could lie and properly benefit from therapy founded on a lie, and she knew she couldn't tell the truth.

She supposed she would just have to do without.

She was doing fine without therapy. The past was the past, and it had no bearing on the present.

The years kept slipping by, rushing to pass as quickly as possible whenever she wasn't looking. Harry was a bright kid, growing up in leaps and bounds, and he fit into her new life like they had both always been there. Like there was nothing more to them than the false history Contessa had established.

The classroom was filled with bright toys and tables and other children, and Taylor barely had time to say goodbye before Harry rushed off to join them for his first day of preschool.

"You've got an enthusiastic one," the woman behind her commented. Her son was still clinging to her side, silently refusing to let go. "What's your secret?"

Being so overly careful out of worry that she had turned out to be a halfway decent mother through overcorrection, maybe. Taylor smiled as she watched her son claim a half-dozen crayons and paper. "I don't think there is one."

"Thomas, you've got to let go," the woman pleaded. "It'll be fun! You can make new friends."

"Don't wanna," her son said into her shirt hem.

There were other parents behind them, so Taylor took her leave to make room in the doorway. Nobody gave her a second look, aside from the few who stared at her stump.

Going back to being unimportant didn't sting as much as it could have. This world, still stuck way back in the past, was actually a pleasant place, relatively speaking. There were no Endbringers. No S-class villains. Not even any minor villains. It was still the era of letting the kids out to play and not seeing them all day, not that she ever did that. Britain felt mostly safe.

There was almost nothing she could have fixed with insects and brutal pragmatism, had she the means. So she didn't miss it.

She was normal. Harry was normal. He liked books about airplanes and dinosaurs and toys and running around screaming. She liked reading, and was looking at maybe going back to school once she had some money saved up, and working out as much as her body and schedule would allow.

Maybe she was a bit too wiry and fit for a single mother who worked as a librarian. Maybe she still occasionally reached for a weapon she didn't have when startled, or lashed out with a debilitating strike aimed at a throat or crotch. She definitely was more wary than anyone she knew in this world, and any would-be mugger would find himself swiftly beaten to a pulp if the situation ever arose, but that wasn't so abnormal. She was missing an arm, but plenty of people had disabilities, and Harry was a sweetheart about helping her on the rare occasion she genuinely struggled with something because of it.

She liked her new life. It could certainly be better, and she missed her father, Lisa, the other Undersiders… But not so much that she would go back if she could. That had to be what Contessa was aiming for, putting her here with Harry, and if so she had succeeded.

Or so Taylor thought, for a few years.

They were stuck in traffic. Worse, they were stuck in traffic within view of their destination, and had been for the last hour. Worse still, it was Harry's seventh birthday, their destination was an amusement park, and they were burning daylight sitting in the car while she resisted the urge to try out her repertoire of British curse words on the jackass who had rear ended the car in front of him out of impatience, and subsequently broken both of their cars so badly the single lane was blocked.

"Stupid cars," Harry complained. "Can we walk there?" He had started out as well-behaved as a little boy could be, but that was an hour ago and now his voice had a whiny undertone Taylor hated to hear. This was not the first time he had asked that question…

And it was not the first time she said, "no, we can't." Mostly because every so often someone tried to drive up the strip of grass on the side of the road, and discovered that there was nowhere to go but to hope someone would take pity any let them merge back onto the road proper once the traffic let up. The road was badly designed, with the edge of a pond on one side and a craggy hillock too steep to climb on the other. It would be scenic under other circumstances, but it clearly had not been intended for this level of traffic, accident or not.

Harry tried the door handle. The child lock was engaged, so his door stayed closed. "Mum, please," he whined.

A car horn blared ahead of them, and she could see figures waving their arms at each other in the distance, in front of the wreck. One of the two damaged cars revved the engine. A cloud of black smoke leaked from under the hood, and the car juddered to a stop before it could go anywhere.

"Look, they're getting out!" Harry pointed out. Closer to them, a mother and father helped their two younger children out of the car to sit on the trunk.

"Only to get some fresh air." That wasn't a terrible idea. She reached to unbuckle herself, planning on getting out and letting Harry out from the outside of the car to do the same–

The child lock flipped to 'off' and Harry's door popped open. Harry himself almost tumbled out of his seat. "Let's go!" he cheered.

Taylor quickly got out of the car and caught him before he could charge off towards the amusement park, her mind on the sudden failing of the child lock. She had not disengaged it. No part of her was anywhere near it when it flipped. Harry couldn't have, the whole point of a child lock was that the child couldn't get it open.

But it had turned off nonetheless.

He didn't seem to know he had done anything, and for a while she didn't think he had, either. The car's child-proof locking system had simply chosen a coincidental time to break. She took a screwdriver and fiddled with the internal mechanism for a bit, just to be sure it wasn't totally broken, and it seemed fine. That was the end of it.

Two months later, Harry had a bad experience with a home-given haircut and a sudden noise resulting in a reverse-mohawk.

Taylor was expecting her son to either still be grumpy, or to have totally forgotten about his hair. She hadn't; she already had an appointment set up for him later in the day, with a professional who might stand a chance of salvaging her mistake the night before. But in the meantime–

Harry tromped down the stairs, his full weight hitting each step as he walked without a care in the world.

His hair was back to normal.

Taylor blinked, then rubbed at her eyes as her son came into the kitchen. Was she imagining things?

She reached out and ran a hand through his hair. "Hey!" he complained, pulling away, but she just followed him, feeling at the place she was sure she had accidentally buzzed down to stubble. There was no glue or other sign that Harry had somehow come up with a convincing disguise; his hair was actually there!

"How did you do this?" she asked, her voice distant.

"Do what?" Harry asked.

Taylor, as a general rule, didn't drink. She worried about getting drunk and saying something she shouldn't. But she went out and bought a case of cheap beer that night, once Harry was in bed.

Under the dulling haze of alcohol, she tried to figure out what could possibly have given her son a trigger event. What she had done so wrong that he now had powers?

She wasn't her father. She wasn't obliviously drowning in her own grief. She was coping. He was a happy kid. Sure, he had his quirks. He made as much trouble and got disciplined as often as any other seven-year-old. But his life was fine. He had friends at school, she had seen him playing with the others, his class didn't have any bullies. He wasn't stressed, he wasn't tearing himself apart over some perceived failing. She didn't work too much. She didn't hurt him. She didn't scare him.

But normal children did not regrow their hair overnight. It wasn't possible. She knew of exactly one thing that could make him capable of that, and it was the same thing she still on some days felt was mentally looking over her shoulder, waiting for her to let it back in.

She drank too much, cried into her beer, and fell asleep at the kitchen table feeling like a failure.

The next morning, she suffered through the hangover, threw the rest of the beer away, and marched up to Harry's room and sat down with him. She asked him, point-blank, what was wrong.

"Wrong?" Harry asked, looking at her guilelessly as only a seven-year-old could. "Nothing is wrong."

Taylor sat on the edge of his bed, her head still pounding through the tailend of a hangover. "Are you unhappy about anything?" she tried.

"No?" Harry screwed his face up at her. "I don't think so?"

"Are you being bullied at school?" she asked. She would not be like her father–

"No," Harry said innocently.

"You know you can tell me anything," she offered.

"Yeah," he agreed.

"But you're not being bullied."

"No!"

"Your teachers are nice?" she asked.

"Yes," he assured her.

"Is something wrong with your friends?" she guessed.

"No?" Harry looked at her. "I don't think so?"

Nothing he knew of, then. "Is there anything you want that I'm not giving you?" she asked, increasingly at a loss. Harry had a good life, she didn't spoil him rotten but she wasn't mean or distant, or maybe she was and she didn't know it…

"I think…" Harry smiled. "A television in my room!" he said enthusiastically.

He didn't have a deceptive bone in his body, not at this age, and she couldn't for the life of her think of anything in his life that would traumatize him to the extent necessary to even open the possibility of powers.

Neither could he, apparently.

She backed off then, unconvinced and uncertain as to what was going on. She hadn't failed as a mother, but something strange had happened.

In the following months, nothing further happened, and she began to think it was just some random medical miracle. Not powers. He would have used them by now, and she might not have her bugs but nothing got past her when it came to Harry. Not when she was forewarned.

That winter, Harry might have made it snow after having a small tantrum about it not snowing on Christmas day.

"You said it would snow!" Harry complained, his face pressed to the window.

Taylor sighed. There was a tree in the living room, there were presents waiting to be opened, but the weather was Harry's first priority. Christmas morning was supposed to have snow, and instead Britain's contrary weather had decided today was a day for pissing rain. "Maybe it will snow later," she offered, knowing that it probably wouldn't.

"I want snow!" Harry yelled childishly. He was a child, she reminded herself, and a little disappointment was expected, though she wasn't going to encourage what looked like a budding temper tantrum if it continued. "Harry, inside–"

"Snow!" he yelled again, but this time he sounded happy, and she noticed that the rain had sometime in the last few seconds quite abruptly frozen into fluffy chunks of crystalline white that drifted in picturesque flurries.

"What the…" She joined her son at the window, twisting her neck to look up at the clouds. How in the world had that happened?

It was a freak weather event, for sure. Their neighborhood and nowhere else got two inches of snow. But Taylor chalked it up to coincidence at the time.

Little oddities continued to stack up, one every few months. By his tenth birthday, she was absolutely certain that something abnormal was going on, and that whatever it was, he had no conscious control of it.

"She called everyone in from recess early," Harry recounted over dinner. "Way early. Thomas asked her why, and she told him it was because we were all being too rowdy, but we weren't, Jasmine wasn't even there today."

Jasmine was a girl in Harry's class that Taylor only knew by hearing of her various escapades. She put every boy in the class to shame for the sheer amount of trouble she could cause the moment no adult was looking, if half of what Harry said was true.

"Then the sub went off on Thomas," Harry continued, ignoring his steak in favor of telling the story. "Said something about him being a little worm, and nobody knew why she was being so mean, he hadn't done anything. Then her hair turned blue!"

Taylor's fork paused halfway between her plate and mouth. "Blue?" she asked.

"Bright blue!" Harry nodded. "All of it! She didn't even know until we all laughed. Then she went to tell the Principal, and he came to talk to us all, but nobody told because nobody got in trouble. I told him what she had called Thomas, and she didn't come back after he left."

So the substitute teacher had been taken off teaching Harry's class – which was good, Taylor already had a reputation at Harry's school for confronting teachers that she didn't want to reinforce – but there was no explanation for the hair.

She thought of Harry's hair, and how it always grew back if she cut it too short, and said nothing. Another incident to add to the list, but she was nowhere closer to understanding the cause.

She suspected her power had a hand in it, budding off to cause a second-generation cape but somehow breaking along the way due to Contessa's meddling. So long as the incidents remained small and deniable and there was no other explanation, she was happy to ignore them.

Scion was dead. There was nothing to fear. She taught Harry a few basic self-defense things, mostly ways of paying attention to his surroundings and how to not draw attention when he didn't want to, and contented herself with waiting and watching.

The sun was shining, birds were chirping, bacon was sizzling in the pan, and Taylor could hear Harry running down the stairs, his sneakers thumping on the carpeted steps.

"Thomas wants to know if I can go swimming with him today," Harry blurted out as he entered the kitchen.

"When did Thomas ask that?" Taylor glanced out the window. It was sunny, but it was also very windy, and Britain didn't tend to have many swim-worthy days, even in the summer. This might be one of them, but it also might not.

"Well…" Harry reached into the cupboard for a plate. "Wednesday."

"It's Sunday now," Taylor noted. "He asked you to go today?"

"Yeah, his mom is going to pick us up." Harry held the plate out.

She lifted two pieces of bacon out with the tongs and dropped them on his plate, then pointed at the fruit bowl. "Eat something more than just bacon and I'll consider it. When is she coming?"

"Noon," Harry admitted.

"If the weather is still nice you can go." She would speak with Thomas' mother beforehand, just to get an idea of where they were going and how long they would be gone, but he was a good kid and his parents were reliable. Not like the parents of some of Harry's other friends.

Harry cheered and ran back up to his room, off to do something or other. He had taken to drawing recently, though Taylor remained unconvinced he would stick to that particular hobby any longer than the others.

She spent the morning cleaning up and then working out in their modest backyard, enjoying the windy, nicely warm day while she could. Thomas' mother pulled up just after noon, and a few quick assurances had Taylor sending her son off to the pool, confident that he would be in no real danger.

She could have gone herself, but Harry deserved time to play with his friends without her hovering nearby. She wouldn't smother him.

The weather was still good and she had a collection of old nordic myths she had meant to read, so she set out a lawn chair and continued to make the most of the weekend.

Hours passed, and the sun began to descend in the West. She'd just gotten to a story about Loki and a very questionable plan involving a horse and a gift for Odin when an elongated shadow passed over her face. A bird. She paid it no mind…

Until it passed over again, and she heard the fluttering of heavy wings.

"What…" She looked up, squinting against the sun, and could have sworn she saw a massive brown owl flapping over the roof of her house, barely missing the tacky weathervane she had never cared enough about to bother removing.

Owls didn't fly in the day. Not often. She dropped her book on the lawn chair and stood, peering up at the roof. Maybe it was injured. There was a news story about two big owls getting trapped in a chimney a few months ago. And one about an owl flying right into an open window and refusing to leave a house a few weeks before that… The birds seemed to be stupid here in Britain, owls especially.

She went inside and walked to the front door, intent on looking to be sure there wasn't a big bird carcass decorating the front yard or something equally ridiculous.

There was a bit of yellow parchment on the floor in front of the mail slot. It was the wrong time of day for mail.

Taylor stopped in the front hall, a peculiar old feeling creeping in on the edges of her mind. A stifling paranoia.

Something was off.

She wished she had her bugs. Being able to instantly know that the house was as empty as it was supposed to be would have been ideal. As it was, she casually entered the kitchen and took one of the long, serrated kitchen knives from the block.

Then, and only then, did she approach the front door, leaving the anomalous parchment alone for the moment.

Someone rang the doorbell just as she was putting her eye to the peephole. She jumped back, knife at the ready.

They rang again.

The fish eye view of her front porch given by the peephole revealed the visitor to be an old man with a startlingly long white beard, wearing an old-fashioned suit, his hands empty. Some salesman, perhaps, or a government official of some sort.

She backed away from the door, the kitchen knife heavy in her hand.

"Get ahold of yourself," she muttered, returning the knife to its block. The doorbell rang a third time. Her car was in the drive, so anyone with a modicum of common sense would assume there was probably someone home.

It was nothing. This world didn't have capes, didn't have a reason to hunt her down. She hadn't even worried about such things in years, a little bit of weirdness shouldn't be enough to set her back.

She wiped her sweaty palm against her jeans, set her shoulders, and forced a stiff smile onto her face. "One moment!" she yelled, then went back to the front door.

The old man was indeed old, and his face crinkled up into a spiderweb of wrinkles as he smiled disarmingly at her. "Hello, is this the residence of a Mister Potter?"

She frowned. "No? I think there are some Potters up the road, but don't hold me to that." All of that stupid misplaced paranoia for an incorrect address? It just went to prove that it was stupid and misplaced. In this world, anyway, and this was her world now.

"Are you certain?" the old man pressed. His eyes flicked down, and she realized as she shifted her foot that she was standing on the bit of parchment. It crinkled forlornly as her sneaker scuffed it.

"I'm Taylor Hebert, not a Potter," she offered, resisting the urge to look down. "You are…"

"Ah, where are my manners." He smiled. "I am Albus Dumbledore. May I come in?"

"Why?" she questioned. "I've said there are no Potters here. Whatever business you have with them, I'm sure you need to get to it, and I wouldn't want to delay you any longer." Maybe a bit rude, but she still had an American accent and he was probably going to assume she was rude regardless. It wouldn't hurt to let the old man in and give him some tea, but she would rather just return to her book and he clearly had something else he needed to be doing at the hypothetical Potter household. Selling vacuum cleaners, maybe.

"Ah, but I…" He frowned briefly. "Perhaps you could humor me… Do you have a son?"

She thought of her Harry. Green eyes, a charming smile, messy hair that she had yet to convince him was worth getting some hair gel for, that odd scar on his forehead… "Yes."

"I must simply have the wrong last name," the old man said, beaming with sudden comprehension. "I'm terribly sorry. I do indeed have the right house, though. He would be just about to turn eleven?"

"Eleven a few months ago, actually," she said carefully. "What are you here for, though? My Harry hasn't gotten into any trouble lately, and he's never mentioned anyone with such a memorable name."

"Ah, he would not know me. I am headmaster of a special school, and we would like to offer him a… may I come in?" He ran his hand through his beard. "I confess, it is quite hot out here and I am sure you would like to hear about this opportunity at length. You strike me as a curious young woman."

"Come in," she offered, stepping back from the doorway. She still wasn't a hundred percent certain this man was legitimately what he claimed to be, but refusing him outright might seem suspicious. If he did try something she could break his elderly kneecaps with next to no effort, so she didn't feel like she was in any physical danger.

He winced as he stepped into the shade of her home. "Ah, thank you miss Hebert. Might I ask if a mister Hebert is home? You may appreciate not having to explain this to him all over again. And Harry, of course."

"There is no mister Hebert, and Harry is out with friends, but I'm sure I can pass on whatever it is you have to offer," she suggested, leading him into their modest living room.

"We could wait," Dumbledore offered as he sat down on the worn old couch.

Taylor took the armchair in the corner, leaving a healthy amount of space between them. "No, please go on. You mentioned a school."

"Yes." Dumbledore nodded. "You could consider us a trade school, of sorts. We always offer places to children of alumni when they reach the right age, and our records listed one Harry Potter as living here."

Taylor frowned, outwardly nonplussed. Inwardly, she was more than a little concerned. Babies didn't come from nowhere, Harry did of course have actual parents – likely miserable deadbeats given Contessa claimed to have found Harry abandoned on a porch in the middle of the night – but until now she had never even known his true last name. As far as the world and Harry himself were concerned, he was Harry Hebert, and for this man to say otherwise…

How did he know?

"I didn't go to any trade school," she said suspiciously. "What was the name of your school?"

"Hogwarts," Dumbledore said seriously. "School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."

She waited for the punchline, but there wasn't one.

"Right," she said, deadpan. The thumping of her heart seemed abnormally loud in her ears. "Prove it."

"You had only to ask," Dumbledore said, removing a stick from the sleeve of his suit. "Something simple, I think…" He tapped the coffee table, and it turned into a dog. A living, breathing black Labrador that immediately set to scratching itself behind the ear.

Taylor realized far too late that it was not normal to maintain a poker face under such circumstances, but any belated reaction would seem even odder, so she didn't bother trying to fake more than a detached, matter-of-fact sense of surprise.

So much for this being a normal world.

"That does explain some things," she said thoughtfully.

"I imagine it does," Dumbledore said knowingly.

Everything was wrong.

It was a nagging feeling, baseless but persistent. A lingering pain from her past, perhaps, but not one that would go away, no matter how often she got blackout drunk and was late for work the next morning.

The other librarians were worried about her. It had been getting worse these last few months, as she had more and more bad days.

"Taylor, dear, you must stop drinking so much," one of the older women said to her as she rubbed at her forehead. She said something else unimportant.

"I'm fine," she replied, and said something to assure her coworker that it was indeed fine, and went about her day. Then she went home, like every day.

There were children playing in some of the front yards lining her street, enjoying the little bit of light between school letting out and the early but lengthening spring sunset catching up with them.

Her yard was empty. As it should be.

One of the neighborhood children came up to her as she got out of her car. Thomas, a teen around… Thirteen years old. He asked her something trivial, and she replied, then shooed him away.

She didn't know why he insisted on talking to her. She was a thirty-year-old single librarian with no children of her own. Maybe it was her arm making her mysterious in the eyes of a child.

Maybe something was wrong. The nagging feeling was back, amplified by the sensation of eyes over her shoulder.

"No," she grumbled, seeking out a bottle of wine.

That was getting worse too. Any day, it felt, she could accidentally breach the thin wall keeping her power out.

She wasn't sure why she was holding it back. The rest of her life was a bland daze that she had trouble caring about. Having control over insects wouldn't make it any worse. She couldn't be any more alone than she already was.

Meeting people just… didn't work. Her job was mostly fine but the librarians had gotten pushy in the last year and she wasn't sure why. Didn't help that she didn't feel like getting into any real relationships, and that the bars she went to were the kind to help her drown her sorrows, not meet people.

Her problems were self-inflicted, but at the same time…

"Fuck you," she said as she raised her bottle in toast. "Contessa."

What had Contessa said? Go forward. Be normal. Tossed enough paperwork at her to prove she existed, and then buggered off.

Taylor brought the bottle to her lips, then realized as cork hit lips that she hadn't opened it. She had already slumped into her armchair – at some point – and didn't feel like getting up, so she set it on the floor and let her eyes slip closed.

She didn't understand why her life was so hard to engage with. Some days she felt mostly normal, but other days she could barely remember anything she said to anyone, or what they had said back. The doctors all said she was mentally and physically fit, and no psychiatrist could help her when she couldn't truly unburden herself. So she just… drifted.

Maybe it'd been stupid to assume anyone who had gone through what she had could ever settle into a normal life.

She had entertained thoughts along those lines often enough in the past year, but on this particular night of no importance, she reached a tipping point. She was sober, miserable, and she didn't know why except to blame it on not being the person she used to be.

"Fuck it," she said aloud to her empty house, and mentally gave in.

The last vestiges of the decade-old barrier between herself and her power crumbled, and she could feel it coming back. Little blips of sensation beyond her body, old familiar friends. Starbursts popped against her eyelids, painless but distracting.

Her power settled back into her head slowly, in stages. It fit like a long-dormant extra limb, much like getting her other arm back might be, but more cerebral.

There were thousands of insects within two blocks of her, hundreds of thousands, and they all snapped into focus, bundles of sensations.

It was invigorating. The fog over her mind lifted, piece by piece.

There was a distinct impression of satisfaction somewhere other than her own thoughts. It came from without, not within, and it came so strongly she could recognize it for what it was.

Back on Earth Bet, she had never managed to communicate with her power, but not for lack of trying. That had just changed, and she had a dull awareness of satisfaction morphing to… anger?

"Didn't know powers could be angry," she huffed, her eyes flicking open. She probably shouldn't have said that out loud, Harry…

Who was Harry? She felt foggy again.

The feeling of external anger intensified, and the fog parted. Harry was her son.

Since when? Since… Contessa gave him to her as a baby… A full decade ago!

"What the hell?" she choked, memories flooding back. Insects all over the neighborhood spasmed and started marching in formation as she shuddered and bolted to her feet, her hand on her forehead as an abominable headache sprang into existence behind her right eye. "What the absolute buggering fucking shitting–"

She slammed her hand against the wall, cracking the drywall, and sprinted upstairs. There was a door on the left of the second floor hallway, a doorknob coated in dust. She flung it open, and inside there was a boy's room, decorated in posters and pictures and with a dresser still flung partly open from a hurried packing spree. The bed wasn't even made.

Harry's room. Her son Harry. She had a son.

Her power radiated consternation, or something akin to it. She had a son, and she had forgotten him.

No. She gripped the doorknob so hard her hand hurt, pulsing in time with the pain behind her eye and in her stump.

She had been made to forget.

'I can take young Harry to the train,' Dumbledore – Dumbledore, the old man with the beard – had said. She remembered now, that morning. She had helped Harry pack, gone through his new textbooks with him one more time, plied him with advice on people and school and superpowers, the latter barely disguised as uninformed speculation. He'd hugged her and promised to write every week. They were going to get into the car. Dumbledore had shown up and offered to take Harry to the train.

'I'd been looking forward to driving him to the station,' Taylor remembered objecting. 'Why are you really here?'

'To do what needs to be done,' Dumbledore told her, and his stick – wand, Harry had one too now – was pointed at her face and she was stumbling back.

Dumbledore went inside, and by the time she had recovered from her inexplicable haze, he and Harry were gone.

Then she had gone about her day, not once thinking about how the old man had all but kidnapped her son from under her nose after assaulting her with some spell.

Not once thinking about her son at all.

"Fuck!" she screamed again, anger like nothing she had felt in years making her heart race. She had been violated, her mind toyed with, and she had never even been allowed to notice.

More memories came to her, restored – yes, that was it, restored, they had been fogged or taken entirely – by her power. By the alien consciousness looking over her shoulder all these years, blocked but not blind.

She remembered Diagon Alley, a culture shock and a half. Her and Harry, Dumbledore escorting them from shop to shop. Magic, magic everywhere, moving objects and shady people and strange robes, all pointing to a vibrant, impossibly well-hidden society nestled in the heart of the normal world. Harry got his wand; she waited outside because the wandmaker was an odd fellow who didn't appreciate normal people.

No, she had been told that. She didn't know it was true. Dumbledore went in with Harry, and they left with Harry's wand, but she had left her son alone with that man then. Who knew what had been done to him while he was out of her sight. She hadn't thought it long enough to be a problem then, and she hadn't suspected Dumbledore of anything.

Dumbledore had been polite. Inquisitive, perhaps, but she remembered…

'Are you certain you do not know the Potters?' he had asked her while they walked through the Alley. 'It is only that the letter is magically addressed…'

'I am no Potter, and Harry's father…' she had hesitated, thinking about what lies would best fit an unknown world with unknown investigative capabilities. 'Maybe he was a Potter. That wasn't the last name he gave, but it was a one night stand and I couldn't honestly tell you much more.'

The old man had nodded and not pressed her any further. He asked other questions, though. About her reaction to magic, which she explained as having expected something was strange because of Harry's own accidental magic. About her arm, which she had attributed to a car crash. About her parents, who she truthfully said were dead, and her accent, which she attributed to living in America for the first few years of her life, something backed up by the documentation Contessa had given her all those years ago.

In the present day, she stormed out of Harry's room, restraining the urge to break things for her son's sake, as it would be his wall she punched through if she let herself. The various insects under her command weren't so lucky, and many died as she worked out a tiny fraction of her wrath.

Harry had wanted to go to that magical school. She had wanted him to go, despite not possessing a lick of magic herself, according to Dumbledore. Why kidnap him anyway? Why erase her memory? Dumbledore had thrown a monkey wrench into her head, and now she could see exactly how massive and intrusive it was!

She remembered her coworkers asking her about Harry. She remembered spouting lines like 'oh, he's doing great at his boarding school' and not so subtly steering the conversation away, all without actually remembering her own words or the subject of conversation at the time. Whole conversations and encounters were blanks she was only now filling in, ripped from her mind by some sort of continuous Stranger effect even as an associated Master effect had her unwittingly hide her own selective amnesia to avoid arousing suspicion.

It was clever. Clever like taking a wrecking ball to a mailbox and not caring that there was nowhere for the mail to go after. Her life had gone rotten with Harry's absence, partly because of her intermittently foggy memory hindering her and partly because not remembering his existence stripped one of the few truly bright points of her life away, leaving her with nothing. Less than nothing, almost a decade that she had been forced to retroactively remember as empty and pointless, a blur that lacked the center focus of her life.

She fled her son's room, retreating to her own bedroom. Dark, muted colors and a nice bookshelf greeted her, as pleasant as always…

She leaped at the bookshelf, a shaking thumb running across spines to find a photo album, right where she now remembered it. A picture of Harry as a baby graced the front cover, apparently enough to trigger the Stranger effect and ensure she didn't touch it for months.

Months. Harry had been taken from her at the end of August, the start of the 1991 fall semester. It was March of 1993 now.

Her son had been stolen from her life for nineteen months and counting.

Angry did not begin to describe how she was feeling. Murderous was closer, but not quite there yet.

She hadn't been Skitter, or Weaver for that matter, in a long time. She had grown soft by choice, leaving her power behind and trying to live a normal life. She had been happy. Genuinely happy.

Now, though?

"Thank you," she whispered. "For bringing my memories back."

Her power conveyed a sentiment close to her own, vindictive determination.

"Now let's get him back."

Notes:

Oh, this story. It grabbed me by the muse and refused to let go. It's my first Harry Potter story of any kind, my first book-length Worm story, and likely to be the story that pushes my total volume of written work published past the 3 million word mark. (For those who are doing the math and coming out confused as to what the other 2.75 million words are, I'm quite prolific in the How to Train Your Dragon fandom).

This is going to be fun . It certainly was fun writing it. I had a beginning, a list of things I did and didn't want to do along the way, and an ending. From there, it all just fell into place for the most part, and with startling speed.

This story is already completely written with a total of twelve chapters counting an epilogue, and not counting a single-chapter bonus alternative perspective with the potential for more depending on whether I end up doing them. Chapters do vary quite a bit in length, depending on what I wanted to cover in each one. As I've written everything already, I'm comfortable posting on an accelerated schedule: One chapter every three days until it's done (so the next will be up on Tuesday, then Friday, then Monday, and so on). This will be going up on AO3 and FF at the same time, under the same story name by the same author, me.