Questions
Harry came to and after casting “Lumos”, he realized he was in what he recognised (why, from where?) as an old air raid shelter, which was now a disused service tunnel off of Golders Green station on the London Underground. The crowded rows of old iron bunk beds were still there. Grey striped mattresses, dusty and half-eaten and infested with whatever vermin was around. Mice and rats, probably.
He was alone. And he remembered lots of things that he didn’t remember before. He remembered Tom’s memories. And there were far more of those than of his own. He could tell, even though his own memories weren’t well ordered at all. But Tom’s were. And Tom had been 54 years old when he had come to the Potters’ house in Godric’s Hollow to kill… oh, shit.
Harry knew that was a bad word. But it seemed… adequate for the situation? He knew that he only knew the word “adequate” from Tom’s memories. But why did he have those at all? Was he Tom? No, he was fairly certain that he was still Harry. He needed to sort out his mindscape. Immediately. If only to figure out how the hell he knew what a mindscape was. Well, first he needed to cast some wards to make sure he was safe.
Harry walked a few dozen meters into the tunnel on either side of the shelter and found that it had been walled off, which explained why there were no traces of squatters. Nevertheless, he cast his wards. Muggle repellent wards, Notice-Me-Nots, Wizard repellent wards, as well as alerts of various kinds keyed to himself. He would have preferred casting a Fidelius, but he didn’t have a secret keeper, and the caster couldn’t be the secret keeper themselves. Tom had gotten around this problem several times in the past, by using snakes as secret keepers. Not much risk of betrayal.
He chose a lower bunk of a bed fairly near the middle of the long row of beds and cast a few anti-pest and cleaning charms, as well as a “Reparo”. He laid down on his side, because his back hurt too much from yesterday’s lashing with uncle Vernon’s belt. Then he scoffed at himself and cast a general cleaning, antiseptic and a healing charm on his back. Harry blinked. That really worked.
He was so confused. One part of him was shocked Magic was real and it worked so well and yet another part of him thought of magic as the only trustworthy thing out there. The relief in being alone surrounded by his own shimmerimg wards was astonishing. They brought the reality of magic home to him in a way that Vernon’s exploding head, apparition and all the rest hadn’t. He turned to lie on his back and pulled the ratty woollen blanket over himself that had hung folded over the foot of the bed. He closed his eyes and sank into a deep meditation almost instantly.
This was a mindscape. Tom's mindscape was modeled on Hogwarts, with a few booby-traps here and there, and Parseltongue passwords to parts of the buildings. Harry didn’t want to create an entirely new mindscape. Tom's mindscape housed too many memories for it to make any sense to try and copy them over to a new one of his own design. His best option was to integrate harry's memories into Tom’s mindscape.
To store those memories, Harry decided that the broom cupboard under the main stairs in Hogwarts’ entrance hall was a very good, sarcastic place to put them, at least provisionally. He spent some time removing the brooms and putting up shelving. Then he made objects that represented themes. And then he pulled out his memories like one would to put them in a pensive, and instead let them slip into the objects. There was a miniature whale for Vernon. A horse for Petunia. A pig for Dudley. A casserole for working in the kitchen. A trowel for working in the garden. A letter A for school. A dog for Marge. A blue wig for instances of accidental magic. And then he cast the spell Tom had invented that tied it all into the wards of the mindscape, making it possible to cross reference everything, with both Harry and Tom’s memories. It took a few hours, but he was only seven years old. He didn’t have that many additional memories. He even noticed that his memories went much further back than most people’s, because he was still so young, he hadn’t forgotten half as much about his early childhood as the average teenager or adult starting out in mind magic would have.
When all his memories were ordered and stored, he went down into the Slytherin common room, which is where Tom went to think and strategise. He changed the password from “Imminent Victory” to “What the Hell?”, both in parseltongue.
It took him about three hours. He vaguely remembered his Mum cutting him just before Voldemort had come in, while kissing him and crying, telling him she and Daddy loved him. There was a slightly clearer memory of that same day. Pettigrew arriving and offering the Potter's up in exchange for rising in the ranks to the status of a marked death eater. It was strange how when looking at tom's memories how after each horcrux they became hazier harder to focus on.With the contrast to harry's clear memories it was very obvious the horcruxes had done aomething to him. No, not him tom, voldemort.
And then there was the golden glow earlier that day when Vernon had been trying to rape him. The tug on the scar. And he realized that he must have been a Horcrux.
Harry rushed out of his mindscape. Jumping off the bunk he cast a whole list of detection spells on himself, most of them fairly dark, and rather illegal. That confirmed it. He had been a Horcrux, but, bizarrely, he wasn’t any more. But he had retained all of Voldemort’s memories, knowledge and experiences right up to the moment in which that Aveda Kedavra was thrown back at him and his body disintegrated. That explained the double memories in his first 15 months of memories. Voldemort’s soul had split, and a part fled, and another, smaller part lodged itself in the open cut of the Sowilo. The protection rune. It seemed like a safe place to flee to. And it had been, from the Horcrux’s point of view.
Dumbledore had noticed the dark magic, but the single detection spell he had cast was light and woefully inadequate. He would have taken it for residue. And Harry now had two sets of memories of everything that happened after the attack. Same visual perspective but different thoughts. He knew that the Horcrux had been sentient, and had come to like him. Certainly enough to want his survival.
Lily’s protection (he knew his parents’ names now!) had been wholly focused on Voldemort. The Horcrux had stopped thinking of himself under that name about a year after the attack and had reverted back to Tom. Because it was no longer “Voldemort”, the protection eased off and it had started gaining strength. It had helped him out sometimes, directing his accidental magic into useful pathways, such as that time when his hair grew back overnight. And the Horcrux had been quite indignant about his living conditions. It did its best to help.
And when Vernon started to rape him, Tom had had a spontaneous thought of “oh no, you don’t!”
He had taken his own magic, little though it was, and had added it into Lily’s protection. He had sacrificed himself like she had, making the protection more generalized. In July 1941, when Tom had been 14 years old he expercied his last instance of rape by Father Michael. Tom had done exactly the same thing with the Confringo back then so when confronted with this danger he encouraged Harry’s magic to respond similarly. Only afterwards Harry had then apparated to the safest place Tom knew of at the time, whereas Tom had gone on to hide and later on disguise the body as a victim of a bombing raid.
Nobody suspected a thing. Harry briefly wondered what the police would make of the scene of Vernon’s death. Or would it be aurors who came, or the accidental magic reversal squad? It was definitely too late to go back and try to hide anything. And he definitely didn’t want to see his Aunt.
But that brought him to the next consideration. How the hell had he ended up with the Dursleys? And why? He remembered Sirius Black taking him out of the house but then handing him over to Hagrid. Hagrid transporting him, Dumbledore keeping him for a day and casting several times on him then leaving him on the stoop, with McGonagall present. But why hadn’t Black taken him in, he was James Potter’s best friend? Why hadn’t they at least checked up on him?
What happened to the war? Was it still going on? If not, who had won? If the Light had won, surely someone would have checked up on him? James and Lily Potter had been members of Dumbledore’s Order of the Phoenix. They had lots of friends and allies.
Lily Potter had taken baby him to a few Order meetings and a few of those times were after baby him could understand color. Now cross referencing those memories with Tom's he could confidently name every member of the Order of the Phoenix. The British Wizarding community was pretty small and insular after all. There were no real surprises when it came to order member's from Tom's perspective but harry/tom felt saddened and a little betrayed seeing Mrs.Figg there. She babysat him enough if she was part of this order why didn't she defend him to the dursley's. They would obviously have been happy to give him to her.
Had Voldemort manage to resurrect himself? Did the Death Eaters gain power? Unlikely, because Voldemort hadn’t told them about his Horcruxes, so they wouldn’t have known what to do (a strategical error if ever there was one, but the man was rather paranoid in the end).
Strange how Harry thought of Voldemort and Tom as two different entities. But his Tom, the Horcrux, had come an awfully long way from Voldemort. He ended up sacrificing himself for Harry. Which made them seperate entities in his understanding.
As to why nobody came for him, Harry could think of several scenarios, but didn’t know which was more likely. Maybe the Light had won, but somehow Dumbledore, McGonagall and Hagrid had all died before they could tell anyone where Harry was.
Or maybe Dumbledore just didn’t give a shit, which was always a real option. The other two would follow his orders either way, but surely Sirius Black would have insisted? Or maybe not. They all thought the sun shone out of Dumbledore’s arse, in Tom’s well considered opinion.
Perhaps the Death Eaters had continued the war with a new leader and ended up winning? They had been very close to victory after all. Of the inner circle, several pureblood Lords could have taken on the mantle of leader.
The question was, would he, Harry, be safe to go to Diagon Alley? Even with a disguise on what he now recognised as his rather typical Potter hair and face, and which would be similarly recognised by any pureblood - would it be more inconspicuous to wear muggle clothing or wizarding? Would anyone care about him? Did people know he was alive? Was he a heroic survivor, or the villain who killed the beloved and feared Dark Lord still venerated by the current government?
Tom’s followers were definitely Harry’s enemies, but were the Light’s followers his allies? He would struggle to play a convincing 7-year-old now… What if the Light thought he was possessed by Voldemort? And Tom/Harry knew just how prejudiced Dumbledore was against Parselmouths.
And he couldn’t even count on Gringotts. If the Dark had won, they may have subjugated the Goblins and seized their opponent’s assets, including vaults, as had been Voldemort’s plan. And this was a plan that the inner circle was very much aware of, it had been part of the persuading arguments for them to join Voldemort.
It would be highly unwise for Harry to walk into the bank and demand access to the Potter vaults if that was the case.
Just in case Voldemort did manage to resurrect himself, he couldn’t use either of the two safe houses that Tom had put away under Fidelius without the Death Eaters knowledge. Besides, he knew about them because of the Horcrux, but Nagini knew about them, too, because she was the secret keeper. And Nagini was very loyal to Voldemort. She would NOT like Harry, whether or not Voldemort was back. No, it just wasn’t worth the risk.