Chapter 140 - Mortem Obire by thatdamnuchiha part 1

Summary:

There was an inexplicable irony to it all, and Harriet would forever curse her 'Potter's Luck' even when she was no longer a Potter in name. Divination was meant to be a joke of a subject, and had coincidentally been her worst grade at OWL level.

Somehow that made her eligible to receive visions of a future yet to come in a world where there's no other choice for her but to become a hero once more.

(or; in which Harriet Potter is reborn as a daughter of Apollo, and all the subsequent consequences this brings.)

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1: chapter one • dying is no easy feat (if your name is harriet potter)Chapter Text

There was undoubtedly something about her which just seemed to scream trouble come and find me. Well, that and the Killing Curse. It was something of a favourite that her enemies liked to try using against her, no matter the fact that she had survived it twice before.

The third time, though, was most definitely the charm, or so Harriet Potter mused to herself as she stared at the blank whiteness surrounding her.

An all-white version of King's Cross railway station greeted her eyes in the next second, the view changing in the blink of an eye, and Harriet could only pause as she realised that she wouldn't be able to go back that time. There was no Voldemort unknowingly tethering her to life. Instead there was just the remnants of the tired girl who Harriet Potter had been waiting in a deathly train station.

"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure."

Dumbledore had once told her that, dead as he was – and that time there was no odd remnant of him to offer her a choice. Instead there was only a single train in the station, its engine that of the Hogwarts Express which had once taken her to a place she could be free. A place of adventure where she had somehow found herself amidst the ruin and wreckage which came from being marked as the saviour. The hero. The prophesised one.

A smile curled at her lips at that, and despite the panging sensation of loss which came from dying and leaving everyone behind, she felt oddly at peace.

Maybe now she could rest. Maybe now she could free herself from the bone deep weariness which had dogged her footsteps ever since she had escaped death's clutches the second time around. Maybe now she could see her parents – see Sirius – and tell them all about what had happened.

Screeching sounds met her ears as she took the first step towards the open train carriage doors which beckoned. It took her only a second longer to realise exactly what those sounds were: the sounds of a train slowing down from full speed rather abruptly, and the unmistakable sounds of a train arriving.

Harriet paused, a shiver crawling down her spine at the sight of the new train which rolled into the station at a slow chug, slowing to a stop with a distinct, final clink. Apparently, even without Dumbledore there, she had a choice. Even if she wasn't entirely sure what that choice was.

The newest arrival in the station of the dead was the complete opposite of the first. It was a metallic dark colour, just a shade shy from black, the interior similarly as gloomy as the exterior. That wasn't what drew her eye though. Rather, the odd symbols carved onto the carriages' exteriors which she vaguely recognised from one of Hermione's books did. Ancient Greek, Harriet thought, though she wasn't entirely sure, what with her not being the absolute maniac of a bookworm which Hermione was. Well, those strange symbols, and one far, far too familiar sigil which marred the space just above the parted train doors.

A triangle containing a circle and a line.

The symbol of the Deathly Hallows.

Harriet swallowed, turning her focus back onto the first train – the train she had decided was the one to get on, peaceful and restful as it seemed. She barely made it two steps towards those tantalisingly open doors before her ankles were hauled out from underneath her. Forces mostly invisible to her eyes dragged her backwards, ignoring the yelp she let out as she struggled and clawed at the white ground she was yanked across. The surface was far too smooth to get a grip on, fingers scrabbling for purchase where there was none, her wand nowhere in sight as she clawed frantically at the too-smooth flooring until the world around her changed from white to black.

Train doors slammed shut in front of her, trapping her in the bowels of that dark carriage and the train which unnerved her so.

She leapt to her feet, lunging for the doors then, heart in her throat at the jolt beneath her feet as the train roared to life. Her hand slammed against the window, only able to watch as that deathly station of Kings Cross slipped from view.

Lethargy hit her then with all the force of an enraged Erumpent, and she staggered at that. "Dammit," she muttered, vision blackening at the corners as the view outside the window plunged into darkness, the eerie green dimly glowing crystals of the train her only source of light. Her knees hit the ground, hand closing around the pole closest to her in an effort to keep her upright and awake. There was no way in hell she was falling asleep in a strange, possibly hostile environment.

"Stubborn, aren't you?"

The voice made her pause, the weight of her own tiredness making her want to do nothing but faceplant the floor and sleep for a millennium. Yet there was a strange voice, and a strange presence in the carriage with her. Shivers rolled down her spine, the hairs on the back of her neck rising. "Who…?" she slurred, her tongue feeling so infinitely heavy like the rest of her.

Laughter was the only thing which answered her for a few moments, and it turned her body to ice. "The bet I made with your Death was worth it," that masculine voice spoke, every word making her feel that much more terrified. Harriet only wondered who or perhaps what could be more terrifying than dear old Tom. She had walked to her death with her head unbowed and unafraid. She was dead once again. "Sleep now," the thing in the carriage with her ordered.

"Like…" she spat out, slipping completely to the floor of the train carriage with a loud, ungraceful thwack. "Hell…" she muttered, teetering on the edge of consciousness for a split second before her eyes flickered shut and everything was lost.

There was a warm thrumming all around her, the sensation of it all making her feel as though she was wrapped in a warm cocoon where nothing could harm her. Not that it could be the truth for Harriet Potter, magnet for trouble as she was, or so she mused. Consciousness had returned to her wherever she was, and wasn't that the question of the century? Nothing was making sense to her, dead as she was supposedly meant to be. Yet there was that awful, niggling sensation that something about that wasn't quite the truth.

Dimly, she wondered what that could be.

Then the tiredness came for her again, and she slept for a little longer before consciousness came back to her, patchy as that seemingly was for her those days. Her mind raced, thinking of the train station, her death, and the male voice which had spoken at her. She thought then on how small she had felt, dead and forcefully dragged onto that train as she had been.

Wasn't there supposed to be some sort of afterlife? Harriet could only ponder on that musing, unable to move, cocooned as she was in that strange warmth which made her feel eerily peaceful.

Time seemed to pass ever so slowly as she lay there, wherever she was thanks to that train she hadn't wanted nor meant to board. The train she had been forcefully dragged onto without her consent. Harriet wondered where she'd have been had she boarded the pale train.

"Death rides a pale horse."

Harriet pondered on where she had heard that saying, drifting in and out of consciousness as she was wont to do in that terribly comfy place which made her feel so very safe for one reason or another. That in itself was enough to make her suspicious when she was lucid enough to think properly.

She was never supposed to be safe, always feeling a clawing of nausea in her stomach when she left her back exposed. She was always expecting a curse to come flying around the corner. She was always expecting Voldemort to reappear and attempt to kill her, and that was even after she had put him in the ground for good. There was always that question of what if. What if there was some dark art which allowed him to come back once more? What if there was another sliver of a horcrux out there, just waiting to be found by the right madman?

Constant Vigilance, as good old Mad-Eye had told her time after time. Harriet wondered what he was getting up to those days, what with what she was getting up to after death. It had all been proven that death wasn't the end as such. Yet Harriet still wasn't quite sure of where she was.

All she knew was that she was warm, almost scarily safe, and no one else was in sight. Not that she could see anything as such. It was more of a sense of awareness, and it told her she was alone.

Warmth pulsed in her chest, a feeling reminiscent of magic whenever she had waved her wand. Yet she didn't have a wand, her magic – if that was what she felt – didn't quite feel the same, and she felt as though someone had draped her in a cloak for some reason. There was a layer between her and reality, almost as though she was wearing the invisibility cloak once more. Even though she could never do that again.

The thought burnt, almost as much as the thoughts of never seeing Ron or Hermione again. After all, she had the distinct impression that they would be able to board the pale train rather than being swept away into the bowels of a dark train, forced to sleep, only to wake up to a cocoon of warmth.

Her lucidity was broken up all of sudden, broken between the clarity of her own thoughts, and images which bombarded her at inopportune moments. They were strange images too, some terrifying enough that she wanted to scream, others ever so peaceful that she could rest easily after they flashed before her eyes. It was different. Intoxicating. Confusing. Terrifying at times.

It was a sign that something was changing, though Harriet didn't have the first clue about what.

She saw a green, grassy meadow, a child with pale blonde hair the colour of wheat laughing and dancing within. There was a part of her which could almost taste the grass on her tongue, the scent of intoxicating pollen drifting from the fields of yellow flowers which swayed in the breeze.

Harriet didn't understand why she was seeing things like that, unless her imagination was working overtime. Though, in hindsight, that was the only possible explanation. Why else would she be thinking of such things when she couldn't seem to dream in that cocoon of warmth and suspicious safety.

She saw a boy facing down a scaled creature with numerous heads, each holding a gaping maw of teeth. She had seen him ripped apart, devoured between the nine heads, red blood staining the ground, a necklace with a few oddly shaped charms left in a puddle of drying blood the only proof of his passing.

If she could have retched at the sight, she would have, and yet she couldn't for some reason. Perhaps since she didn't have a physical body. She had died, after all, and she still had no clue what was going on. Briefly, she wondered if she would ever know what was going on with her, hard as death had been to come by.

"Run along, hero," the eerie female voice told her in one of those images-turned-scenes. "I've killed hundreds of your number."

The ground had been stained red, the creature whose voice that belonged to nowhere in sight. She hadn't seen much of the fight that turn around, left only with the knowledge that the hero had been devoured aside from his booted foot which had rolled from the shadows, leaking a lurid, bright red, the eggshell white of bone poking from the bloodstained skin and leather.

Hero.

That word turned her stomach to mush – if she still had a stomach, that was. Either way, it felt sickening; a reminder of the life she had left behind. The-Woman-Who-Conquered. That had been her official name. Her title as a hero of the Wizarding World – even if she had only borne it for a couple of years before falling prey to a dark wizard.

She wasn't an auror anymore, and part of her almost felt comforted by that fact. She was done with chasing the bad guys as had been expected of her. She was done smiling plastically for photos and interviews. She was done with the façade which had made her feel like butter scraped over too much bread. She was free from that.

It was almost scary how light she felt at that, like a load had been lifted from her shoulders.

Dimly, she almost thought she heard a biting, cackling laughter ringing from somewhere in the back of her head. As if someone, somewhere, knew something she didn't and was laughing at her folly. Though she had probably been left alone with her own thoughts for a little bit too long for that to happen.

It was after the sight of dolphins breaking through the waves, the high-pitched chittering sounds they made still echoing in her ears when she felt the world around her shift.

The change was jarring, the sense of safety she was slowly getting used to vanishing as everything seemed to constrict around her. All in all, she wasn't sure how long the twisting, moving, contracting sensations went on for, but she knew when they were over, if only because that was when the coldness came for. A whimpering sound met her ears at the touch of the icy chill which dissipated as something washed over her body. The sensation of fabric on skin, wrapped around her was an odd one. She recognised it nonetheless, despite it feeling like a lifetime ago that she had fabric brush against her skin.

She was warm once more then, but it was different. It was a warmth she recognised: one which could easily be stolen away, rather than the enclosing warmth she had grown used to. Shivers wracked her body, a murmuring of voices meeting her almost sensitive ears. Why would her ears be sensitive? The warmth bubbling beneath her skin in place of the lightning-like magic she had grown used to, stirred then.

A sensation of hands holding her, cradled around her body, were the next things she registered. Wrongness rang through her, and it took her a few moments to realise that those hands felt bigger than they had any right to. Well, unless one was a half-giant like Hagrid. Merlin, she missed him, just as she missed Hermione and Ron – a wound she never thought would heal.

Her eyes snapped open, the world around her a blur of lights, a blurry face just about edging into view as she was cradled to someone's chest.

"Hello, Harriet," came the feminine voice from above with a distinctly American accent, a finger brushing against her cheek. "My darling daughter."

Harriet screamed.

Rebirth, or reincarnation, whichever one preferred to call it, was apparently a thing. Who knew?

Harriet certainly did, still reeling in the shock of her new situation, and she could only stare at the mobile above her as she stared vacantly at the ceiling above her. A vision of her overactive imagination hit her again then, the ceiling above her vanishing as she saw a bipedal bull-like creature lift a car above its head and throw it away as rain and lightning pelted down around them. A woman vanished into gold dust. A boy with sea-green eyes cried.

"Harriet," the voice of her new mother floated into her awareness, and she came back to that world around her then. "You're awake," her mother murmured, reaching down into her crib to pick her up.

Celeste Mary Carter was her mother's new name, and her red hair was the only similarity with Lily Rose Potter. Harriet only wondered if she had inherited her red hair at all in that new, strange life she had received. It would be a far cry away from the black she had as a Potter. Though that was a moot point given she was a Carter right then and there.

Harriet wasn't sure what to think about that. In fact, she wasn't sure of what to think about most things which went on in her life right then and there.

There was also the worrying, gnawing concern over the fact that she had seen neither hide nor hair of her father while she was there.

If she had another family, then she wanted them to be whole and safe. If they couldn't be murdered by a dark wizard after she had just turned one, that would be even better. Her heart beat furiously in her little chest at the thought of such a thing happened, a phantom of possessiveness rising up in her chest at that.

She'd never really had a family before – not one which had cared about her. The Dursleys had never counted, and she had the barest of recollections of her first parents. Red hair, a falling body, a dying mother's scream, and her father's pleading words for them to run. Harriet could only wonder what her new family right there and then would be like. As long as they didn't despise her existence like her aunt and uncle had, then she thought she could deal with it.

She was tired of being hated for something she couldn't control.

She was tired of being hated for propaganda and lies spread baselessly.

She was tired of being the darling hero of the Wizarding World.

An almost happy babbling noise escaped her at the thought that she was finally free from that burden. She was Harriet Carter. Not Potter. She was free of the name which, in hindsight, had felt like a shackle around her foot, dragging her down deeper and deeper. Part of her almost thought that she could get used to that strange place.

Even if she was all alone.

It was during one of her crawling sessions that she finally came across the mirror, and it was no Mirror of Erised. Her reflection was the final nail in the coffin of Harriet Potter. There was no other way to put it—she was blonde.

Blondeness had always been something she had associated with the Dursleys. Aunt Petunia had been blonde. Cousin Dudley had been blonde. Though theirs had been more of a wheat-like blonde, paler than the practically golden locks which grew out of her head in soft waves. It was a far cry away from the messy black hair she had once had, though neither was it the red she had almost been expecting.

It also meant she took after her new father, and in more ways than one. She couldn't see any of her mother's features amidst the baby fat which rounded her face out, but she didn't have her mother's eyes, blue as they were. Instead her eyes were a startling shade of what she wanted to call molten gold. Yet no one had golden eyes, so she simply had to have honey brown eyes which just caught the light oddly. The way they almost seemed to glow was evidently just a trick of her imagination.

It wasn't like she had creature blood to explain any inhuman-looking features. She didn't want any creature blood either, what with the discrimination against those types. She just wanted a normal life as a normal witch, even if she was muggleborn that time around. Though that was provided she was still a witch. She wasn't sure if she was still a witch, given she hadn't performed any accidental magic – and that was even if she still had her magic, strange as the bubbling, almost sun-like power which pulsed in her chest at times. It was warm and comforting, and it always made her feel less adrift in that strange place she had found herself in.

She was undoubtedly an oddity.

Harriet didn't think many babies could remember their past life, if they had even had one. She also had the sneakiest of suspicions that her being the so-called Master of Death and collecting the Hallows had something to do with her reincarnation.

She didn't think she'd ever be able to forget the dark train and the strange, eerie voice which had scared her so. That would haunt her forevermore, given she still didn't understand it. She had never liked things she couldn't understand, yet it was her first time fearing something like that so much.

"Harriet!" her mother called – her single mother, she had long since learnt. "There you are. Don't scare me like that, baby…"

Harriet grunted in the best form of agreement to that plea. Her infernal baby tongue couldn't really pronounce things as of yet. She was trying though, when her mother couldn't hear all her pitiful babytalk. There was something to be said about being an adult in the body of a toddler; that being it was ridiculously embarrassing, all the things she used to be able to do with ease but couldn't in the small, untrained body.

A vision crept into her sight then; a forest bathed in moonlight, the howls of wolves echoing in her ears as the sounds of arrows being loosed came. A pair of twins, one golden-haired, the other dark-haired, hunting their quarry with their bows.

The scene changed, a girl dressed in the garb of a hunter bleeding out, black veins pulsing slowly beneath her skin even as her red blood stained the ground.

Death.

There was always so much violent death that she saw; that her imagination brought to life before her eyes. Harriet could only wonder about why that was the case. Her own death had been relatively peaceful, and though she had seen plenty of death and grievous injuries in the Battle of Hogwarts, there was just something so startlingly gruesome and tragic about all the deaths she was seeing. Certainly, she had been up close and personal with death, but the Killing Curse had been painless. Her death had been painless, and the ones she imagined – daydreamed about – were anything but painless and peaceful.

"Shh," her mother crooned, rubbing at her back in a way that made her feel so startlingly comforted in a way she never remembered being before. "It's okay, baby," she murmured.

Harriet came to the startling realisation that she was crying.

Not only that, but her mother was comforting her. Something inside her shrivelled up at the realisation. Tears had always been few and far between when she had been Harriet Potter. A lifetime of Uncle Vernon slamming on her cupboard door and bellowing at her to shut up, damned freak whenever she had made too much noise.

Soft sounds of singing drew her attention away from the memories of her past. The memories of a life she wouldn't be returning to. She wondered why that thought felt so freeing, an odd sense of guilt creeping up on her at that very thought – because wasn't she supposed to be traumatised and miserable that everything she had ever known was gone?

Selfish little freak.

The singing kept on, the happy, cheerful notes drawing her attention and keeping it focused on the beautiful red-haired lady who had given birth to her as she cried near silently. That in itself was probably worthy of being called freakish. After all, what sort of a baby didn't make a sound when they cried?

Harriet only wondered how long it would take for her new mother to realise how strange, unnatural, and freakish that she was.

There was something like a shroud over her and the possibly-not-magic which bubbled in her chest, Harriet realised eventually, standing at the gates to what could only be a nursery as such – or preschool as her mother had called it. She was three-years-old and living in an apartment with her single mother who needed to head back to work and could hardly afford to hire a fulltime nanny.

Still, despite the fact that it was necessary, and that she could hardly logically stay at home alone when she appeared to be so young, Harriet hardly wanted to go to preschool. Her tiny, chubby fingers dug into the fabric of her mother's pants, fear pulsing in her chest at the sight lain before her.

She had seen monsters eat people alive in her strange imagination. She had faced down Tom Riddle. She had walked to her death with a grace no one expected of a teenager. Going to preschool should not have been terrifying. Yet it was.

"You can do it, Harriet," her mother said, crouching down to speak with her. "It's nothing to be scared of."

A shrill high-pitched scream of a child made her wince and clutch at her mother's leg all the more tighter. She was often referred to by the neighbours who'd babysat her a few times before as a quiet child. She was quiet. Too quiet. She didn't like the noise, nor was she used to making noise.

Rather she was simply supposed to be hiding in her bedroom, pretending she didn't exist when the Masons came around for dinner. Though there were no Masons, no Dursleys, and no Potters, the habits had stuck, and Harriet wasn't quite sure how to rid herself of them. She didn't even think she wanted to rid herself of them. Just in case. One never knew what the future had in store for them, after all. She certainly hadn't seen more life after her untimely death coming. She didn't think anyone would dream of such a fate when death was supposed to be a final rest.

"You must be Miss Carter," a new voice came, and Harriet could only watch with wide, curious eyes as an older lady came over to them. "And that means you would be Harriet," the lady said, smiling widely at her as she stood by the entrance to hell. Or what Harriet could only think of to be her own personal hell, given she had evidently escaped such a fate when she came back from death for a third time. Though that time she was a Carter, not a Potter.

A scene crept into her sight then, ever at the most inopportune time, of a girl quite a few years older than her being dragged screaming in the darkened woods followed by sounds Harriet was all too familiar with after three years of being subjected to such visions. The sound of flesh being rend and devoured, the wailing screams as someone was eaten alive before their throat was ripped out or before they lost too much blood and succumbed to their inevitable fate. Harriet swallowed, thinking of that golden hair so much like her own before it had vanished into the darkness. Like sunlight being swallowed up by the endless night.

"Harriet." There was a firm pressure on her back, urging her forwards to where the other lady with grey-streaked hair was holding out one large hand with a soft smile. "I need to go sweetie," her mother told her, and reluctantly, Harriet relinquished her grip on her mother, straightening her spine as she went forwards to face the horror which was preschool.

"Don't worry, Harriet," the older woman said kindly. "There are plenty of other girls and boys in the same situation as you"—that statement in itself almost had her laughing hysterically—"so you're sure to make lots of friends."

Harriet smiled wobbly, wondering if such a thing was possible for her, given how she was mentally older than every single child there. Unless everyone had a habit of remembering their past lives, and somehow she highly doubted such a fact. Ever was her life strange and unique, and even death couldn't change that much. Or should she say that death had been the cause of both of her strange lives? She had died and been reborn with her memories intact, and that made her strange. Far too strange to interact with normal children.

Oh, how she wished for normalcy…

Somehow she doubted she would ever get to be something as simple and mundane as normal. Then again, she reckoned everyone born so normally longed to be something special and different. As always, the grass was greener on the other side.

The older lady whose name Harriet still hadn't heard beckoned her forwards, leading her and a few other stragglers into the classroom where another, younger lady waited. There were a pair of glasses perched on her nose, bright green eyes which surveyed the latest arrivals with a slight interest. "Is this the last of them?" she asked, reaching for what could only be a register as such.

"Yes," the older lady said with a sharp nod, ushering them towards where other snot-nosed brats were sitting on the carpeted seating area. "We might as well start with introductions…"

Harriet shivered, seating herself on the cleanest-looking section of carpet with a generous amount of space between her and the other children. Someone sniffled close by, and she clutched her knees to her chest as she found herself amidst a pack of children in a large room which was divided between a clear area with a chalkboard in front of them, an area with miniaturised chairs and tables, and another are clearly meant for playtime.

By her second week in preschool, she had firmly established herself as the quiet, well-behaved kid who wasn't prone to making much trouble. It was also the point at which she acknowledged that something was very, very wrong compared to what she remembered of her life before her most recent death. The first thing was the fact that she couldn't sit still to save her life – well, she could sit still, and yet she needed to be doing something with her hands in that case. Otherwise she could have bouts of what she classed as hyperactivity. She struggled to pay attention sometimes, though before being placed in a classroom setting, she had mostly attributed it to her tendency to have those strange, vivid daydreams and the fact she was a child with absolutely terrible impulse control. After being placed amongst other children, she could safely say she had noticed the oddities in her own situation, and they went beyond death and rebirth.

The next thing she had noticed, both shortly before she had gone to preschool and after she was there was her reading ability. She knew English – she knew how to read it very well, thanks to her days as a Brit which had given her an odd accent amidst her American mother and her American classmates as such. Therefore it stood that she thought she would have no problem when it came to reading and writing. That theory was soon proven wrong.

Letters on the page seemed to swim, a fact which frustrated her to no end and made her want to throw books across the room when she could barely get through a single sentence. A huff escaped her, part of her giving up on reading right then and there, which was how she found herself leaving the reading group which she had furiously been a part of for a whole week despite her struggles.

She exchanged the written word for music time.

Which was how she discovered the piano, the violin, and the harp. They were in the big music room where the bigger kids went for actual music lessons, and as such they weren't allowed to touch them. Children of her actual physical age would only break and mar instruments as fine and almost delicate as those were. Rather, as preschool kids they got the triangles, the tambourines, and other small, more sturdy instruments which could withstand a beating by toddlers.

There was no other way to put it: it was a cacophony of sounds which grated against her poor eardrums. Still, she enjoyed playing an instrument, even if she felt the triangle didn't really count as opposed to playing the piano. Still, a new passion was born that day, and it effected her for years to come.

She saw a pair of blonde twins, perhaps fourteen-years-old if her guess was anything of an estimate, smiling and laughing as they raced up the steps to an archery range deep within a rich, green forest.

The girl was the first to die.

Harriet startled back to the living world, absentmindedly noticing that a fair few minutes had passed. It wasn't the first time she had seen death with that odd, overworking imagination of hers. It wasn't the first time she had seen the colours of human innards. It wasn't the first nor the youngest person she had imagined dying by a monster's hand – for that was all those creatures could be.

Still, she couldn't help but wonder why the forms those monsters seemed to take were always Greek. Or at least the ones she saw so often were. The nine-headed hydra; the chimera; and the lamia. They were some of the ones she had seen most frequently ripping into children and other adolescents.

Occasionally they themselves got turned into golden dust.

Yet they always came back – ever determined to haunt her for one reason or another, and ever there and ready to kill another unsuspecting child. Harriet thought she hated the thought of Greek monsters with a passion, no matter how unreal such things were. The very idea of them irritated her beyond measure. Though Harriet could only wonder if that was her own, accursed, heroic nature talking. She had thought she had left such a thing behind with her death, but she had the sneakiest of suspicions that her own self-sacrificial tendencies would come back around to bite her in the backside sooner or later – even in that seemingly peaceful life where her mother was kind and had survived past her second year.

"Harriet!" The sound of the front door opening and the sound of her mother's voice made her perk up from where she had been sitting, watching a musical contest on the television with her babysitter for the few hours which had been between the end of preschool and the time her mother got out of work. The sun was low in the sky, an amber blot on the horizon. "I hope you're ready for your music lesson!" she called, and Harriet, who had been busy kicking her feet back and forwards, fully dressed and ready to hurry off for her first violin lesson.

Her babysitter, Mrs Thompson, laughed, bidding her and her mother goodbye as Harriet hurried towards her mother eagerly. "I'm ready!" she declared, bouncing back and forth on her small feet. "Let's go!"

"Alright, sunshine," her mother remarked, a wry glint in her eye as she led her down the steps to their apartment and towards their car. It was a simple black Honda, and Harriet always sat in the front passenger seat, long having proven herself sensible enough to not disturb her mother when she drove them from place to place. Not that she had been many places aside from the closest park and her preschool.

Harriet almost skipped down the steps, a smile on the face, even as the looked across the moderately busy road they lived on. A frown curled at her lips, her confusion blatantly obvious as she caught sight of the odd view on the steps to a sizeable building opposite. There, on those slate grey steps, sat three old ladies, knitting some vastly oversized socks. Dimly, Harriet wondered if they would fit Hagrid, before hating herself for that thought because Hagrid was gone and the year was wrong. Still, that didn't detract from the fact that three old ladies were sitting there, and the rest of the world was seemingly oblivious to the odd sight of them on those steps.

The weirdest fact had to be that they were all looking at her and smiling like they knew something she didn't.

"Harriet!" her mother called, stirring her away from the odd sight before her. "We need to go, sweetie, unless you want to be late."

"Sure thing," Harriet chirped, hurrying towards the car as quickly as she could on her tiny legs.

When she looked across that same street as they were pulling out, the old ladies were gone with their knitting supplies and everything. Like they had never been there in the first place.

Shivers rolled down her spine, her own unnerving eyes catching sight of their reflection in the wingmirror. Ever was there that creepy, dreadful feeling that she was missing something blatantly obvious. Harriet didn't have the first clue as to what, only putting it down to her previous paranoia.

That was all it could be when she didn't have a connection to the Wizarding World.

The same Wizarding World she had never caught a glimpse of.

Just like she hadn't performed any accidental magic, despite the wellspring of bubbly power buried deep in her chest. Harriet didn't know what to make of that, and neither did she know what to make of the creeping, terrifying sensation that something was very, very wrong.

The first clue that something was wrong was the fact that floor was shaking back and forth. As though she was on a train. Harriet sat bolt upright, heart thudding in her chest. The second clue that something was wrong was the darkness which was lit up by familiar dull green crystals which glowed with light. The third and final clue was the voice which soon spoke up.

"Ah, so she finally awakens," the familiar voice came. "Or should I say: she finally dreams…"

Her eyes narrowed, peering through the gloom to find the figure perched on the train carriage seats. He was dressed in a light armour which seemed familiar for some reason – or at least the style of it was – his colour scheme seemingly being black—and Harriet could only wonder when exactly she had turned into Lavender. Hair of an ashen blond was tied back in a slim ponytail, flicked over his shoulder to dangle like a pendulum as he tilted his head, rested his chin in the palm of his hand, and examined her with an almost avid curiosity.

"Your father's blood runs thick in you," the male said, thin lips curling up into a wry smile. "It's overwritten everything – from the old you, to your new mother's genes. Then again, things get funny when beings like me get involved."

Harriet blinked, the most unintelligent sound escaping her mouth. "Huh?"

A low chuckle rent the air, and Harriet only stared into his eyes, feeling like she was being sucked in. "Soon, child. Soon," he promised. "The answers will come in time, sole child unbeholden by the fate of this world." A brilliant grin curled at his lips. "I can hardly wait to see the chaos you will bring."

"What?" Harriet muttered.

Then she woke up in her bed, heart racing, something like indignation stirring as she thought of the owner of that voice. The same one who had to have dragged her into that dark carriage and brought her there to a new life.

Harriet wasn't quite sure if she was supposed to be angry or grateful.

She was freer there than she had ever been as Harriet Potter, and yet she hadn't quite chosen such a fate for herself. That choice had been ripped from her when she was dragged into the train and ferried away from that deathly train station.

She saw a concert hall, lights bearing down upon the three on the stage, an instrument in their hands each. Golden eyes looked up, the glasses she was wearing making them look as blue as her mother's eyes. Harriet looked at the scene, and at herself upon the stage, watching as her own lips quirked up in a smile, and the other blonde, slightly older children on the stage began to play a melody.

The scene shifted, as they were wont to do.

Happiness could never last.

A boy with black hair and bright blue eyes which looked ever so familiar narrowed his eyes, an almost fiery aura seeming to radiate around him as he took in a breath. Harriet wasn't quite sure what happened, but a dark aura almost seemed to radiate from him, a whisper of promised death and sickness reaching her ears as he breathed out.

The image twisted before her eyes, a vision of that same boy walking amidst a field of corpses which had died from what could only be illness. A plague. The explanation came to her unbidden, and Harriet opened her eyes and gasped once more.

Part of her wondered if she was becoming desensitised to death, what with her imagining imaginary people dying of imaginary, yet plausible causes. Even if monsters didn't exist, the way they had died at least made sense. It had seemed so vivid and real. Harriet swallowed the odd lump which rose in her throat at the thought.

Harriet Carter was five-years-old when a big upheaval happened in her life. First came the diagnoses of ADHD, Dyslexia, and absent seizures – or so they called her blank moments when she was lost in her imagination. Second came the news that they were moving a little ways away – which ultimately meant that she was going to have to change schools – or more aptly not go to the school attached to the preschool she had been attending for two years by that point.

She changed school, moved house, had her violin and piano lessons through the new school since they had the facilities to host those classes.

It was while waiting for her music lessons in the corridors that she bumped into them though: a pair of twins as blonde as her – and it took her a moment longer to recognise them. She had seen their faces after all, and she never forgot a piece of music either. It had been a melody so beautiful. A melody which had made her feel as though the three of them had been scrutinised beneath someone's gaze.

They were the twins who had been on stage with her, in a concert hall.

But that had to only be a coincidence – an odd, terrible coincidence that she had dreamt up a pair of twins performing music with her. It wasn't like she was a Seer, able to see the past, present, and future. Otherwise she would have been seeing the deaths of real, actual people for years on years. Harriet thought such a revelation might just be the thing which drove her to madness. So of course it couldn't be correct.

It was a coincidence.

Still, it couldn't stop the terrible, niggling feeling that the concert hall hadn't been the only place she had seen them.

The girl smiled brightly at her, her brother following a moment later, introductions were made, and Harriet had the oddest of feelings that she might be on the way to making some actual friends for the first time in her new life.

She ignored the terrifying, eerie sound of two strings being cut.

It didn't mean anything.

It couldn't.

Chapter 2: chapter two • making friends and influencing people is harder than it soundsChapter Text

Laurel Woods and Alexander Woods were both three years older than her and twins to boot. They did many things together, including, but not limited to, playing instruments, shopping for clothes, and making friends who could stand the pair of them.

Harriet didn't quite understand why some people didn't like them, kind, cheerful, and oddly mature for their grand age of eight as they were. They were vastly more tolerable than any other child either their or her actual age.

"So you play the piano and the violin?" Laurel asked, the pair of them sitting with her for their lunch break. "You're lucky. Mom only allowed us to pick one instrument each," she remarked, grinning at her, even at the looks they got, both what with how they were somewhat ostracised. "I picked the piano like you, and Alex picked the cello!"

"If you played the violin we could do a three-instrument piece together," Alexander mumbled, his voice far quieter than that of his sister's.

Harriet could only ponder on whether or not that was an overture of friendship from the quieter boy. Not that he was that quiet. It was just that his twin sister was far more chatty in comparison, or so she had swiftly figured out within her first minute of meeting them before her violin lesson the other day. It was a nice change from the quiet for once. "I think," she said, thinking then of that strange vision and whether or not she wanted to make it come true. "I think I would like that." That melody they had made had sounded so wonderful.

A scene flashed before her eyes, a boy of thirteen years singing in Ancient Greek, a wound beneath his fingers healing in a golden light, and Harriet could only stir herself from her daze and wonder why exactly she had understood Ancient Greek in the first place when she had never heard it spoken before. And why what could only be magic had been performed without a wand in her imagination. It made so little sense, along with her odd newfound ability for a language.

Or was that a newly discovered consequence of her reincarnation?

She wasn't quite sure when the supposed aftereffects of such a thing would fully be discovered, given how she knew by then that reincarnation was hardly common to those lands. She was hardly an idiot, even if she wasn't a Hermione.

"Great!" Laurel declared, eyes lighting up in excitement. "But we'd either need to find a piece that has each of our parts, or create one of our own…"

Harriet blinked, feeling as though she had vastly underestimated the twins' love for music and everything else about it. "Wouldn't that be a bit… like, above us, or something?" she asked, peering at the older girl. She hadn't been having lessons for too long in the grand scheme of things, and she wasn't sure of the specifics about composing a piece.

Alexander shrugged at that. "Music… It just seems to come really easily to us," he said. "Mom said we get it from our father…"

"Huh," Harriet mumbled, pondering then on the fact that Laurel and Alexander, like her, didn't have an active fatherly figure in their lives. "Cool."

"You can help us make it too," Laurel prattled on, smiling so very sunnily. "I heard you practicing the other day, and it was brilliant!"

Harriet supposed she was the eldest there in the simplest sense of the word, even if no one there was aware of it. She thought she might as well help as best she could. It wasn't like she had anything better to be doing, friendless and alone as she would be without the pair of them at her side.

"Yeah, it was awesome," Alexander mumbled, no less enthused or sincere.

A hint of a blush crept into her cheeks. "I'm not that good," she muttered, ever uncomfortable with praise and admiration as she had been before. After all, it was only thanks to her unique circumstances – her achievements that was – in that life and the one before. It didn't feel too much like anything gained through hard work. It felt like cheating, and there was that adage which said cheats never prospered. Aunt Petunia had told her that one too many times, not that she was still her aunt as such.

"But you're good enough to play with us, yeah?" Laurel said, grinning and slapping her small form on the back.

Harriet supposed she might as well enjoy her time with them – what with the fact they'd be off to junior high before her. Then she'd be on her own for three years, unless she managed to find any more friends. She doubted that though. Laurel had approached her first and all but demanded her friendship. She had the slightest of inklings nobody else near her age would do something like that. Neither did she want to approach anyone else.

Groups had long since formed, cliques as such, and Harriet was firmly in the outcasts section, along with another unfortunate boy named North Adrians. She didn't particularly feel the need to befriend anyone, either. It wasn't like she was lonely, especially with the twins still there. Besides, she was fairly certain they'd still be able to see each other, more so with all of them being musically inclined. They ran in the same circles, music wise, at least.

"Thank you?" Harriet tried, ever uncertain as to what she was supposed to say. She was different, older in mentality, and it showed. Children all too often were cruel to that which was different, clueless as to the whys of that difference. Her lips curled up into a smile at that. They weren't half as bad as Dudley who'd once pinched her arms and pushed her down into the dirt one too many times. Rather, they left her to her own devices, ostracising her in that way which was ever so slightly familiar to her. It brought back vague memories of being raised on Privet Drive and how the children at St. Grogory's Primary School had isolated her once before on the word of the Dursleys. That though – that had been worse than what she faced on her second go around.

The fact that she even had a second go around was mind boggling and still ever so slightly confusing.

A scene crept into her sight then, hallmarked by the shades of gold which crept into the very corners of her vision. That wasn't what startled her though. Rather, it was the fact that nothing had changed besides those gold hints in her peripheral. She swallowed, feeling an odd lump in her throat at the sight.

"Hey, losers!" Cathy Beckett from the twin's class called, jeering at them then. "Why're you hanging out with a baby?" she demanded, storming over to the end of the table where she towered over the twins and sneered at Harriet.

Another small child sauntered over to them, and Harriet could only wonder why the kid thought that walking that way was cool. He just seemed to be trying way too hard. "'coz they're babies too, obviously," Gabe Jinkson declared, smirking at the three of them. Harriet could only ponder on how exactly those things were the kind of words the pair of them would spew. She had already had plenty of experiencing the two older kids and there form of admittedly rather pathetic bullying. Even Malfoy had managed better. Though Harriet supposed it was a lot to expect from eight year olds. All too often she forgot how small and young she was. On the outside, at least.

A carton of milk was poured over Laurel's head, and Harriet blinked at that, watching as Laurel turned in outrage and the voice of one of the teacher's sounded.

The vision ended, the golden tint vanishing from her sight, Laurel waving a hand in front of her face, and Harriet felt her cheeks heat at the acknowledgement that she really spaced out far too much. Really, she would be useless in a fight like the ones she… daydreamed about so much. "You okay?" Laurel asked, peering at her in concern – in a way which told her that her darling, beloved mother had asked the older kids to look after her. It was only a matter of time before Celeste Carter demanded she meet her only friends.

"Hey, losers!" an all too familiar voice sounded with those all too familiar words. Harriet felt her heart skip a beat, a dawning sensation of dread weighing down her stomach. It wasn't possible – it couldn't be. "Why're you hanging out with a baby?" Cathy Beckett questioned, ignorant to the sheer utter terror those words evoked within her.

Footsteps echoed in her ears, a churning sensation in her gut at the sound of those small feet padding closer and closer with a mouth ready to say words she didn't want to hear. "'coz they're babies too, obviously," Gabe said, jeering at them.

Harriet's eyes flashed up, her breathing shaky as she watched the older boy open the carton of milk and pour it over Laurel's head, feeling sick to the stomach at the sight even as the world around her exploded into noise. Her stomach twisted, the sound of Cathy's screeching voice and Gabe's nasal laughter echoing in her ears as she sat there, far too shocked and terrified to move. Part of her wanted nothing more than for them to both shut up. Irritation stirred, overcoming her terror for but a moment. The power in her belly stirred, rising up through her, no longer feeling warm and sunny. Rather, it wanted to hurt. Harriet couldn't find the strength within herself to stop it, only able to watch as it seemed to harmlessly lash out at the two children who had turned her world on its head. A teacher's voice came over the din and the pounding in her ears and her head at what she had just witnessed. Her hands shook, part of her screaming inside of how it was a fluke and that it couldn't be real. The other part of her sat in a quiet numb compliance.

There was a twisting sensation in her gut, memories of bloody visions and flesh being rent coming to the forefront of her mind. It hadn't mattered too much before, being just her overactive imagination. It hadn't been like there were real people murdered before her eyes while she sat there and did nothing in the slightest. Harriet leant over the side of her seat and retched, a hot, burning sensation in the back of her throat as her undigested lunch came right back up.

Voices reached her over the pulsing in her head, a teacher's face appearing in view, the ringing in her ears as she stared at them, breathing heavily, feeling altogether too warm and unquestionably sick in that instance.

Naturally, she was swiftly taken to the nurse's office, her mother called to pick her up as she sat there, staring blankly into space. She didn't pay too much attention to that though, what with the terrifying thought that those visions of hers were real. Real beyond the sense that she saw them. Real in the fact that she might have been witnessing real, living people – real, living children – die in front of her eyes when she could do nothing to save them.

Harriet wasn't quite sure when she fell asleep, but a familiar train greeted her tired, blank eyes as she sat perched on the edge of the train seats. The familiar being was back, watching her with eyes which seemed to suck away all light as though she was staring into the void. Pale blonde hair was braided up that time, loose strands framing his face as he stared at her and smiled darkly.

"Denial does not suit you, Harriet," he purred, resting his chin on his palm as he sat on the train seats opposite her, completely and utterly relaxed as opposed to her tense form. "I told you once before: your father's blood runs thick in you." He tilted his head, chuckling lowly under his breath. "Did you truly think there would be no consequences to being one of your father's most powerful children to date, hm?"

She stared at him, too busy reeling at the idea that she was seeing the future. In the words of Professor McGonagall, divination was codswallop. Divination had just been a bogus subject she had taken to stick with Ron and get an easy OWL. Not that she had gotten that particular OWL, and nor had it been easy in the slightest. So how did that translate to seeing the future and the rest of the world around her in her newest life? She didn't understand in the slightest, and part of her felt as though she never would, even sitting there in that unexplainable train with an inexplainable being.

"You care far too much, child," he murmured, shaking his head and breaking the odd staring contest they had just been having. Not that Harriet felt she was aware enough of her surroundings for that. Rather she was still reeling at the fact that she could possibly, maybe, apparently see the future. Like a true seer. "Learn your boundaries – you cannot save them all, little hero. Some of them have already died long before you came into this world."

Harriet blinked, crinkles forming in her brow.

Laughter rang out again. "Those who truly see, see both past, present, and the future yet to come." Fingers brushed against her skin, cold and inhuman. "There is a reason that none of your half-siblings have yet inherited the prophecy abilities of your father in full." A smile curled at his lips, dark eyes glinting with barely concealed amusement. "It drives an ordinary mortal's mind mad. How lucky you are not so ordinary." Teeth bared in an approximation of a grin, canines unusually pointed. The smile of a predator. "There is only a little risk of you going completely insane and being smited by that little lightning brat. Delightful."

"Huh?" she muttered, staring at him in abject confusion. She barely understood anything which came out of his mouth, and that was before the bombshell that it wasn't her imagination or daydreams she had been spacing out over. She apparently could see the future. Not only that but the past and present too. Harriet didn't understand in the slightest. She didn't want to. It was just a terrible dream, and that was all. "I'm not a seer," she said almost reverently, earning herself a pitiful look from her dreamtime stalker. "I'm not." Her hands shook, bile rising in her throat at the memories of all the gruesome deaths she had seen over the years. "I'm not."

"No, darling," he murmured softly, hands patting down on her shoulders, lips coming to rest by her ear. "You are an arbiter of fate, and all that entails." His hands clapped down on her shoulders once more. "Do try not to drive yourself insane, and do the world a favour and stop denying what you know deep down to be true. It will make it so much easier on us all."

"Harriet!" her mother's voice snapped her from the clutches of the dream, the lingering image of the smug, satisfied grin curling at the lips of that creature ingrained in her mind as she blearily opened her eyes and stared at her mother. "Come on, sweetie," her mother murmured, stroking a cool hand across her brow. "You've been asleep for so long, so you're probably real hungry by now. I made soup," she declared, and Harriet only heard her stomach rumble pitifully. "Come on. Sit up and have some."

A tray was deposited on her lap once she had shuffled into a seated position, propped up by a mound of pillows. Her mother crouched beside her, looking at her in palpable concern as she slowly ate the soup her mother had prepared for her. Numbness was all she really felt, sitting there, a terrifying prospect looming over her like a thundercloud as she tried to deny what she saw when daydreaming.

Only she couldn't really call it daydreaming any longer, could she?

Harriet swallowed thickly, stomach twisting as she sat there, paused in her eating as the reality of the situation seemed to slap her around the face once more. It couldn't be true. She didn't want to have been watching the deaths of real people. Hermione had always said she had a hero complex and all that entailed. It would drive her mad to see people dying, when perhaps she could have saved them. What else would visions like that be for? Harriet didn't understand. There was always a choice between doing what was right and what was easy. Rare was it that she chose the easy route. Her life as a Potter had always been such.

The soup settled in her stomach heavily, and she let go of the spoon with a distinct clink of metal on china. She still felt so horribly ill, the queasiness she had felt earlier not having subsided in the slightest. Her hands shook, a feeling of dread settling into her stomach at the prospect of another vision. She didn't want to see any more death. Though Harriet knew better than to cling to the flimsy thing called hope. Death was an unfortunately intrinsic part of her life, what with the amount of times that death hadn't stuck to her – hadn't left her floundering around in the supposed afterlife. Harriet could only wonder if she had been banned from the afterlife for one reason or another. That would certainly explain a lot of the madness which always inevitably followed in her wake.

Her vision shifted, bile rising in her throat as a forest crept into her gold-tinted vision. She had seen that place before, in another, earlier vision. That was a fact she knew in her bones. She also knew it had been one of the ones with such a violent ending. Why it was seemingly repeating itself, Harriet wasn't sure. There were a couple of them which kept on repeating, the scenes of children wearing newer armour and those others who wore clothing of that time period, the stories yet to pass and come true as the fate before her decreed.

The same fate she was seemingly exempt from due to her little reincarnate status. She was not a being originally of that world, and she hadn't the first idea of how she was supposed to feel about that, normal as she wanted to be. Yet she could never be normal, and that fact was slowly starting to sink in, no matter how much she wanted to deny her ability to see the future. And the present and past.

Two children smiled and laughed, the night sky blanketing them as they wandered through the forest, lingering near an archery range. Camp Lagoon's archery range, if the sign nearby was anything to go off of. Blonde hair gleamed in the moonlight, blue eyes glinting as they saw the targets at the end of the range. Harriet felt her stomach drop to her toes, a daunting, gaping chasm opening up in her belly. She recognised those faces, older as they were and without a significant amount of baby fat. How could she not, when she had seen them, so much younger, earlier that very day? Laurel and Alexander Woods smiled and laughed beneath the moonlight on a humid night, a bit older than their current eight years of age.

She saw strings that time – a flash of two yellow strings beneath a pair of scissors, ready to snip – and her stomach twisted, knowing instinctively what that meant.

A faint hissing sound met her ears, and Harriet felt her hands go to her hair and pull even as the twins – her friends – carried on, oblivious as to their approaching doom. "Turn around," she whispered, already knowing they wouldn't hear her. It was just a vision, after all. It wasn't like she was actually there. "Please," she muttered, only able to watch as movement stirred the underbrush and a serpentine figure slid across the grass.

Clawed hands reached out, closing around Laurel's ankles and dragging her back into the underbrush, bow and arrows clattering to the ground as blonde hair vanished into the darkness of the forest. "Laurel!" Alexander screamed, even as Harriet covered her ears, bile rising in her throat as the familiar sounds of flesh being rent by claws and teeth met her ears. The wet slapping sounds and the high-pitched screams of one of her only friends ringing in her head. "Laurel!" Alexander yelled, looking terrified even as he strung an arrow on his bow and ran into the forest.

"Idiot," Harriet muttered, hands shaking as his screams reached her as he lost against the monster in the woods and was subsequently devoured. Her eyes stared blankly into space, shivers rolling down her spine. "It's not true," she whispered, wishing fervently that the being on the train was wrong – that what she saw was mere coincidence.

Yet she could never be normal, could she?

"Please," she mumbled brokenly, because she didn't want her friends to die. They were the only ones she had – the Granger and Weasley to her Potter. "Please…"

She saw the title of the news the day after that, the words engraved into her brain. Tragedy Strikes Camp Lagoon: Two Children Killed in Animal Attack. Gold faded from her vision, the sight of her bedroom coming back into view, the sunshine yellow of her walls seeming to mock her as she stared sightlessly at the wall opposite her. Pale white curtains were drawn, the lack of light seeping through the cracks indicating how very late it was in the day.

Numbness clawed at her, body feeling ever so heavy even as she lunged for the bowl her mother had left by her bedside and threw up once more. Sounds of skin being torn and devoured rang in her ears as she sat there, trying to eat to the best of her ability. Her hands shook, the familiar feeling of nausea coming back around to bite as she sat there, trying to make sense of everything. Yet for her, it seemed, nothing could ever, truly make sense.

"Oh, Harriet," her mother whispered, appearing there all of a sudden, concerned as ever. "Sweetie, can you tell me what's wrong?" she asked, and Harriet only blinked blandly. The words wouldn't come to her lips, part of her too caught up in the vision which had just hit her. Sightless blue eyes weren't what she wanted to see. Blood-streaked golden locks weren't what she wanted to see either.

Her back flopped against her pillows, her mother wiping away at her mouth with a damp cloth. She waited until her mother had finished before she grabbed at her quilt and pulled it over her head, curling up into a ball beneath her blankets and shaking like a leaf as her vision turned a familiar tinted gold. Not yet, she wanted to plead. Not again. Yet those words wouldn't come to her lips, and she was forced to watch scene after scene play out, monsters which would haunt her nightmares looming before her and the children they would kill.

Distantly, she was aware of her mother rubbing at her back, and the tears pricking at her eyes as she lay there, drifting between vision after vision, ever traumatised by witnessing death after death, with little happier respites few and far between. It was no wonder why ordinary mortals, ordinary children, would go insane from such sights. Harriet wondered if her own abnormality would be enough to keep her sane amidst all the deaths she saw.

Part of her doubted that much.

"Morning, Sweetie," her mother called, even as she padded into the kitchen quietly, her apparent sickness over and done with after a number of days of being tormented by vision after vision of the future. "The school just called," she said, looking between her and the fried eggs and bacon sizzling on top of the stove. "Apparently they had to close the facilities after yesterday."

Harriet tilted her head in question, the silence she all too often maintained after those days of visions and her screaming herself hoarse for it to stop because she didn't want to see those things anymore unnerving her mother ever so slightly.

Her mother smiled almost indulgingly. "They're checking the facilities," she stated, a soft sigh escaping her. "There's a real nasty virus going around, and it hit everyone at your school real hard – it's spreading fast and they're trying to see what could have caused it."

"Virus?" she croaked, wondering if it was just her luck that the day she had been determined well enough to go back was the day that her school was shut because of a virus.

"Yeah," she nodded at her question. "Apparently some kids older than you, Gabe Jinkson and Cathy Beckett came in the day after you were ill with a nasty virus and spread it around. I do hope they're alright… They had to be taken to hospital and everything – there was a facebook post wishing them a quick recovery – though those twins of yours managed to avoid the worst of it."

Something sunk in Harriet's stomach at that pair of names, the vaguest sense of guilt rising, but for what, she didn't quite know. They were bullies who liked to pick on her friends and anyone younger than them for one reason or another. She shouldn't have felt guilty about anything, really.

"So, I know you have some schoolwork to catch up on," her mother said, catching her attention. "But since we've got the day off to spend together, is there anything you'd like to do?" she asked, peering down at her, even as she flipped the bacon and readied some plates for their breakfast.

"Can we have waffles?" Harriet mumbled, thinking of one of her favourite breakfasts or sometimes desserts in that life. Maybe that would be able to cheer her up somewhat, after all the madness which had descended on her forever odd life.

Her mother blinked, glancing between the bacon and eggs before smiling. "Tell you what, we'll go out later to that nice little diner which does those waffles you like," she said, ruffling her hair, and Harriet attempted a smile – something which had escaped her ever since the reveal that she might be a seer or whatever it was called.

Denial doesn't suit you, Harriet.

The words echoed in her brain, the permanent sense of dread which had lingered over her like her own personal storm cloud returning at full force. She didn't want to see more people die. She didn't want the twins to die. Yet she couldn't stop that gold-tinted vision from descending upon her every time she was awake. Part of her almost wished she could sleep forever and never see another vision again. That would be an easy way out though, and even though she was a Carter rather than a Potter the fact remained that she would always choose what was right over what was easy.

The right thing to do would be to save as many as she could, wouldn't it? Her stomach twisted, fear coming to eat away at her as she seated herself at the table and stared at the plate her mother set before her. She wondered if it would be that easy to change the futures she had apparently seen. A scoff escaped her as she ate. Denial was seemingly fleeting for her. It was almost odd how quickly she was coming to terms with her newfound ability. Though weird things had always happened, thanks to her odd luck, and she had always found a way to overcome them.

Harriet smiled shakily, trying to enjoy the day off from school that she had, and true to her mother's word, they went to the quaint diner a little down the road and had the most delicious waffles for dinner – a special treat, her mother called it. It was – special, that was. If only because they didn't manage to go back to the diner for over a year, thanks to the pandemic which erupted across the globe, spreading at an unprecedented rate in the course of a few months.

The source of the pandemic was traced quickly back to its origins: her elementary school.

Laughter echoed in her ears in her dream, the familiar sight of a train carriage reaching her when she went to sleep amidst the lockdown which had been declared over the USA. The being across from her laughed and wiped a tear from his eye as he doubled over. His hand slapped his knee, his smile turning dark and highly amused as he stared at her dumbfounded form. "My, Harriet," he murmured, almost purring her name as they sat there in that all too familiar carriage. "First you discover your father's prophecy ability, and now you have found your father's plague ability. Wonders and entertainment never do cease with you around, little arbiter…"

"Huh?" Harriet blinked, a weight settling in her stomach at his words. "Plague…" she mumbled, trailing off as she wracked her brains and prayed it wasn't what she was thinking. It couldn't be. Denial was ever a thing for her, or so it seemed.

"Do you not understand yet?" he asked, peering at her with those dark eyes which always unnerved her so. "This pandemic of yours was not supposed to happen according to the original fate of this world. Though, admittedly, there would have been one in a good few years time. Now, there is only one kind of being who could cause such delightful chaos: an arbiter of fate. One born outside of this world's fate and able to change it at will." Sharp teeth glinted in the green light. "Guess who happens to be the only little arbiter of fate in existence currently?" His eyes glittered with untold mischief and delight as she quivered before him and his words. "Oh, that is right – you."

Harriet blinked, the statement taking a few moments or minutes to sink in as she sat there in her strange dream. "No," she muttered, thinking of the rising death toll and hospitalisation rates she had seen on the news before her mother had switched it over to a children's channel. "No!"

"Yes," he murmured, a grin on his lips as he found amusement at her expense, as ever he did. "Do you not remember? Though I suppose you were experiencing an odd upheaval with figuring out what your visions truly were… Your distress caused you to infect those two bullies of yours and your friends with a nasty little virus." He smirked at her silence, oblivious, though more likely uncaring, as to her own distress in that very moment. "Truly, you really are the most powerful child of your father to date – inheriting two of his rarest abilities," he said. "To think you would be capable of causing a pandemic at your age. Most who inherited that plague ability could only cause the mildest of hay fever at your age too. So very powerful…"

"I don't want it," Harriet said softly, hands shaking as the truth came to claw at her much quicker if only because she remembered. She remembered the hot, harmful sensation in that glowing probably-not-magic within her. She remembered it lashing out at Gabe and Cathy. Besides, it wasn't like the being before her had ever lied to her, strange and terrifying as he was. It wasn't like that glowing ball of power she sensed in her body behaved like she thought magic was supposed to either. Little things were adding up, painting a picture she was slowly beginning to dread.

"You hardly have a choice," he replied, smiling still. "One does not choose their abilities. You are simply born with them to make of them what you will."

Harriet blinked, stomach feeling as though it had shrivelled up into a tiny pea-sized ball as she sat there, caught between acceptance and denial. It wasn't like strange things hadn't happened around her – it was just this time they seemed to be amassing a body count. Harriet didn't want to amass a body count. That was what Voldemort had done, and she was nothing like him, no matter how similar their childhoods were.

"Relax," he murmured. "Do you really think that lightning brat and his motley crew would not realise that this lovely pandemic of yours is not supposed to have happened?"

"I—I…" she muttered, feeling an explicable sense of guilt at the thought of how exactly a deadly disease had spawned from her of all people. Typical Potter Luck. Or should she say Carter Luck? Harriet wasn't entirely sure. A choked laugh escaped her, vision growing blurry as tears filled her eyes. Her own brand of luck had never caused such deadly chaos before. "I didn't mean to," she whispered, thinking of that hot, angry sensation in her belly when it had gone down.

"Your father is fixing things, cleaning up the mess one of his children has undoubtedly made," he said then, and she blinked at the hand which came to rest on her head, ruffling her golden locks as she sat there, torn between guilt, dread, and the dawning sense of realisation. Something she should have realised long ago.

"Magic," she said, the word almost feeling foreign on her tongue. "It doesn't exist here, does it?" she spoke, the tears in her eyes only burning heavier. Though her words didn't really come as too much of a shock to her. There had always been that strange niggling feeling that something wasn't right whenever she thought of the magical community and how she hadn't even seen whisps of MACUSA's presence or anything of the like as there should have rightly been. "This place isn't the… world… I knew and loved." Her hands shook, the phantom whispers of the ideas of meeting aged-up versions of Ron and Hermione in Wizarding Britain vanishing like smoke in the wind.

The hand in her hair ruffled her golden locks once more, and that time there with that strange being suddenly didn't feel as eerie or scary as it once had. Instead it felt strangely comforting. "Poor child," he said softly. "Did you honestly think there were no worlds other than your own? Did you truly think you had been reincarnated in your same universe? Such an idea would be inexplicably cruel, even for myself," he continued, heedless to her sniffles. "To be amongst friends when they know not who you are, years after your supposed death."

"At least it would have been familiar," she muttered, pulling her knees to her chest and burying her face in them.

"There is magic, as such, in this world," he spoke, and Harriet looked up, almost hopeful, meeting those dark eyes which seemed so very ancient and infinite. "But it is not like the magic you were so used to in that boring old world of yours."

Harriet sat there, silence falling between them even as that hand kept mussing her hair as she stayed seated, frozen and lost in thought as she tried to piece things together. If it had been Hermione, Harriet was sure she would have already figured things out. She wasn't her past best friend though. Her brow furrowed, brain racing a mile a minute as she thought on everything that strange being on that dark train had told her whenever she dreamt.

"Never mind," he said, evidently spying the concentrating, confused face plastered over her expression. "Your father will fix this mess of yours – though I would advise you lay as low as you can, unless you want daddy dearest to drag you off to camp. An exception would likely be made for the Ancient Laws in such a case as this, if only to stop you from causing more chaos…" He grinned. "Ah, how I do love chaos…"

Harriet blinked, the ceiling of her room coming into view, the light flooding through the gaps in her curtains casting her bedroom in a warm glow. Her eyes felt heavy, nose feeling so terribly blocked as she lay there and stared above her. The ceiling was just so interesting all of a sudden, until something clicked in the back of her head.

"My father," she mumbled, teeth sinking into her lower lip, hand going to pull at her chin as she wracked her brains. It wasn't like her mother seemed anything out of the ordinary magic or not-quite-magic wise. All the clues lain at her feet by that strange being seemed to lead back to her father. Whoever he was. Harriet hadn't quite thought her father's identity had mattered, what with him not being there. She had never really asked her mother about him – she'd had one father before, the one who had given his life for her and her past mother. It wasn't like she had truly needed another one.

Her door creaked open in that moment, familiar blue eyes peering at her, and upon seeing her awake, her mother came into the room. "Harriet," her mother murmured, a soft sigh escaping her as she spied her ill form. "Honestly," she said, moving to wipe at her brow, pushing back her sweaty golden locks. "You'd think you'd get a respite from being ill," she muttered, shaking her head. "I'll bring you some breakfast in."

"Mom," she croaked, a small clumsy hand snatching at her sleeve, stopping her before she could leave. "My father," she continued, ignoring the tense expression that spread across her mother's face. "Who is he?"

Blue eyes bore into her bright ones. "You've never asked about this before," she said, almost seeming to silently ask why now as they stared at each other.

"I wasn't curious before," she stated, holding that gaze until her mother finally relented and answered her question as best she could. "I am now."

"You have to understand – your father and I weren't together for long," her mother explained, looking wistful as she mused on the memories her father had left her with. "His name was Fred, and we met when I was a folk singer before I had you. He… liked music, and we grew closer thanks to that." She paused, evidently trying to wrack her brains for something else to say about her suddenly rather mysterious father.

"There wasn't anything strange about him?" she asked, staring right into her mother's eyes then.

Her mother's face froze in a tense smile. "No," she said, and Harriet wasn't entirely sure where her gut feeling came from, but she knew her mother was lying right then and there. "Now, I think it's time you had some breakfast, Sweetie."

She flopped back on her bed, head landing on her pillow. The impact felt off though, and Harriet frowned at that, knowing there was something under her pillow. Though she hadn't left anything under her pillow the night before.

An echo of laughter rang in the back of her head, and Harriet shivered at the idea that someone or something had been in her room while she had been sleeping obliviously. She sat up, scrambling to lift up her pillow and see what had been left there. Knowing her luck it could have easily been something dangerous.

Harriet stared, light glinting off metal beneath her pillow. "Scissors?" she muttered, glancing between the three items which had been tucked underneath her head without waking or stabbing her. Scissors and a pair of knitting needles. The metal wasn't silver like was usual for those kinds of implements either. Instead they gleamed a shiny bronze-like colouration.

Gingerly, she lifted them, a pair of knitting needles in one hand, the scissors in the other – which was, of course, when her mother returned with the usual porridge she ate whenever she was ill. Her mother's eyes fixed on her new, odd array of acquisitions. Her tray of porridge was set on her bedside table. "Harriet, where did you get those?" she demanded, holding out her hand. "Those are far too sharp for you."

Scowling at the reminder of her tiny body, she begrudgingly held them out to her mother, only to blink when her mother's hand passed right through those scissors. "Huh?" she mumbled, glancing sharply between her mother and the scissors, watching as a dawning realisation spread across her mother's face.

"Harriet, where did you get those?" her mother questioned, reaching for her shoulders and holding her in place. "Please. This is important."

She shrugged at that, feeling mightily uncomfortable at the sight of her mother's gaze, intent and fearful as it was. "They were just under my pillow when I woke up," she answered, tightening her grip on the scissors and knitting needles which only she could apparently hold. "Also," she murmured, uncertain of where her sudden burst of courage came from. "You lied when you said there wasn't anything strange about my father." Her eyes held her mother's gaze, watching as she seemed to wilt under the intensity of her strange stare.

Her mother breathed out a long sigh, a soft laugh escaping her as she stared down at her, so irrevocably fond. "Truly," she whispered. "You take after your father far too much."

"Well, I look like him, don't I?"

"Your hair is paler than his," her mother murmured, eyes growing distant as she evidently immersed herself in the memories of her father. "Plus you have my eye colour. Besides that though…" she trailed off, smiling then, oblivious to the way Harriet's own smile had become fixed – because her mother's eyes were blue. She grabbed a hold of the porridge as it was given to her on her usual lap tray, waiting until her mother had left the room with a fond smile before she grabbed a hold of the small mirror on her bedside table.

Her reflection stared back at her, her golden hair bright, and her unnerving golden eyes staring back at her.

Laughter rang out once again in the back of her head, and Harriet knew undoubtedly who that laughter belonged to as that familiar voice rang out in her mind.

You hardly thought I would make it that easy for your father to find you, did you?