Chapter 3
Hadrian Peverell had to admit his choice of name was rather arrogant. The Peverell line had died out centuries ago after all. The direct line that was. From what he knew several of the pureblood lines claimed Peverell ancestors. But the Potters were perhaps the most direct descendants and Harry knew an old name could get him into a lot of places. Such as the Peverell estate. Or what was left of it anyways, Harry thought as he took the front stairs to his small Manor house two at a time. The stairs were old, made of hewn stone blocks that had been worn by countless generations of feet to the point where when it rained the water cascaded down the groove in a stream, like a small waterfall.
The sturdy blue painted double doors swung open on silent hinges as if of their own accord and Harry flicked his wrist slamming them closed behind him. He kicked his shoes off and left them on the worn and cracked hallway tiles, not bothering to put them away on the shoe rack on the side of the hall. Two long strides had him through the archway to the living room. New hardwood floors complimented the old stone hearth in the corner. He threw his long lanky form down along his classic upholstered couch, and flicked his hand towards the fireplace, igniting the wood and spreading warm flickering light across the room. He raked a hand through his hair, smoothing his hand down over the wide white slash on his forehead and rested his palm over his eyes for a moment.
He hated waiting idly. And for the past year he had had nothing to do but wait and watch. Being patient was not his strong suit. Thus he now had a part ancient and simultaneously shiny new Manor house.
He lifted his hand a little, staring straight into his scarred palm. What looked like a random fistful of gears was branded into his palm. His gaze moved down to his coffee table slash heavily warded display case. Under his pile of papers, magazines, few letters and his teacup from last night were some of his most valuable and dangerous belongings. And in the middle was the partially assembled remains of the cursed device that had brought him here a little over a year ago.
He stared at it a moment.
*
For a moment the familiar portkey like sensation had caused him to panic, remembering the last time he had been transported somewhere by a portkey against his will.
Then he steeled himself. He was not a 14 year old child anymore. I'm hardly even the same person I was back then.
Just as the whiteness subsided and he felt himself brought back to the physical world, he bounced off a ward, flung ass first out like when you try to apparate inside wards you can't cross. Which seemed to be exactly what had happened, as he landed hard on the asphalt outside the townhouse he had just been inside. The device in his hand exploded sending little clockwork cogs flying in all directions. And then he was promptly almost run over by a brand new Ford Cortina. The driver hit the breaks, probably giving himself whiplash, and honked, shouting obscenities. Harry jumped agilly to his feet and got out of the road.
A moment he just stood there confused. He looked up at the townhouse. Why would they make a portkey to the same place they were going from?
But then he noticed. The door. The door he had just blasted to pieces was repaired. Not a mark on it. Was this a different townhouse? He looked around, the street name catching his eye on a corner. No same street same house number.
Had he somehow been in portkey limbo for an extended period of time?
He noticed a newspaper sticking out of the neighboring mailbox. Jackpot. He went for it. It was a muggle paper, predictably. The daily prophet would hardly be sticking out of a mailbox in the middle of a muggle street.
He scanned the top for a date. August 17th. Well, it had been June a few minutes ago. He'd lost a couple of months. He hoped his auror colleagues had got the group without him. Little he could do about that now.
Then he registered the big bold headline and the accompanying picture. King Elvis is dead.
He stared blankly at it for a moment uncomprehendingly. He didn't exactly follow muggle pop culture, but Elvis? Was this some throwback tribute or some such? He looked at the date again. August 17th 1977.
*
Harry thought back to that day. He had immediately apparated away from civilization and hid. Ending up by instinct in the forest of Dean.
Time travelling was not something to mess with. A small misstep and he could change everything. Causing his own birth never to happen for instance. Little was known about time travel, so whether it would cause him to wink out of existence or get stuck in a paradox, he didn't know. But it was not something he would risk.
For a while he just paced the forest in a panic. Eventually when he settled down he risked going back to the townhouse to try to collect the pieces of the device.
He didn't know if he found all of them. And remembered at least one had fallen off before, or after as it were, in the future.
He made camp in the forest of Dean and for a few days he just tried fiddling with the device trying to put it back together. But the magic on it seemed to be gone.
He considered seeing if he could find a time turner, but breaking into the Departementet of Mysteries and stealing one might be enough to change things and besides time turners that existed in 1977 could only travel back, and only a few hours.
He considered sneaking into magical libraries to research time travel and see if he could find a way back, or forward he supposed. But that risked being seen. And he was no genius inventor. He didn't think he could make a new type of time travel device based only on theory.
Finally he started realising, bar someone from his time figuring out when he was and coming to find him, he was stuck living out his life in the past. Not only that, but alone, not able to live among people for fear of changing too much.
Travelling back a few hours like he and Hermione had done when he was 13 had limited consequences he knew. Sure, you could inadvertently cause your own death, but only what could transpire in those few hours could change. Going back over three decades he might change everything by simply stepping on a butterfly.
He spent the next few days crying and raging and contemplating suicide. That would probably be the right thing to do for the greater good. But he wasn't the kind of person who could take his own life.
Eventually he resorted to stealing alcohol and trying to stay permanently drunk, too desperate to consider the consequences of the stolen bottles or his lack of self control in his drunken state. Eventually he was just numb.
He had transfigured as much of his appearance as he could so if someone saw him he wouldn't look like future Harry or his dad.
He started apparating to a dark corner of diagon alley in the early morning before the shops opened and nabbing the daily prophet from a newspaper stand. He couldn't take not even being able to observe the world.
And that's how he found it. Inconsistencies. At first he thought he just remembered things wrong, or been told things a bit wrong. But then a few bigger ones. Something happening a bit earlier or later than he remembered learning. Books he remembered from hogwarts with slightly different titles or appearances.
He was afraid it was because of him, that he had already changed things, but when he looked into it just a little further he found inconsistencies that happened years before.
He wasn't in his own past, he couldn't be. He was in an alternate Timeline.
*
Considering alternate timelines and the multiverse were only speculation and insubstantial theories, Harry felt he had taken the news well. He'd thrown a fucking party. He'd been sure he had to live alone on the fringes, but if this wasn't his Timeline then fucking it up and causing himself to die or not exist, probably wouldn't affect this him or cause a paradox. Lord this was confusing. Essentially baby Harry in this universe wasn't him.
Without thinking further he had gone to the leaky cauldron and gotten rip roaring drunk hugging anyone he could get a hold of and generally making a spectacle of himself.
When he got over his hangover he started thinking.
This wasn't his Timeline, so he didn't have to care about what he changed, but perhaps he should?
He had thought he was done carrying the fate of the world on his shoulders after the second wizarding war. He supposed he had a responsibility as someone who knew what the future probably held, to do something. He didn't have to let things happen like before, he could try to fix everything that had gone wrong in his Timeline.
The world and events seemed to be almost the same, so while he couldn't be sure things would happen the same, he thought a lot probably would.
Damn his hero complex but he felt responsible. If he was going to change things he wanted to save his parents. That way a different Harry could at least have the life he wished he had had. And he was in time. He would be born in 1980 and his parents killed in 1981. If the Timeline stayed similar.
If he started changing major things the Timeline would probably start deviating more and more until he could no longer predict it. So he maybe only had a short while, and he should probably choose wisely what to involve himself in.
Before he got too plan-happy he wanted to do an actual test, and he knew the perfect one, only it was a risk.
He made his way to Ollivanders.
*
Ollivander looked much the same as he would in a dozen years. Harry wasn't sure what he should or shouldn't say, so instead he simply held his wand out, the one Ollivander had sold him, for Ollivander to look at. The man exclaimed and snatched it.
"This is one of my wands. Holly, 11 inches, phoenix feather. But… I haven't sold it yet." He looked up at Harry an unreadable expression on his face before he went into the back of the store coming back with a wand box. He placed Harry's wand on the counter, the box beside it and lifted the lid.
They both looked at the two wands.
"May I?" Harry asked. When Ollivander only studied him, Harry reached out, picking up his wand, and then gingerly the identical one in the box. Only it wasn't entirely identical. His own 20 year old wand bore small nicks and scratches and wear from use. Most visible were the groove his fingers had made in the handle where he gripped it. The one from the shop was flawless.
Harry touched his wand tip towards a spot low on the new wand and silently made a small but defined scratch, perfectly straight across the stick.
Holding his breath he held out his wand, examining the same spot, but there was nothing there. He looked up at Ollivander who's expression was one Harry couldn't quite decipher.
"Should you be here?" He asked slowly.
Harry put the wand back in the box and closed the lid taking another look at his wand. He knew Ollivander wasn't talking about the shop. Harry had always felt that Ollivander, like Dumbledore was more than most regular wizards.
"I have no choice," he answered. "There is no way back."
*
Now he knew his presence wouldn't break the time space continuum he got a room at the leaky.
He needed a more permanent persona and with it a permanent change in appearance. Transfiguration was well and good, but too easy to remove. He remembered the waterfall at Gringotts that removed all glamours and deceptions. He needed to truly look different enough that no one would suspect he might be Harry.
And the most important part of that was his scar. He hoped he could stop the events that would cause baby Harry to get it, but it was still too distinctive.
He'd bought some medical supplies in preparation. The lightning scar was a curse scar, those often didn't fully heal, if at all, and wasn't something you could remove with spells. But he'd heard nothing about scarring it further. In theory he should be able to expand the scarring and thus hide the lightning bolt or change the shape. He hoped the theory was sound or else he might be mangling his forehead for no reason.
Standing in front of the mirror, he braced himself. He wasn't particularly scared of pain anymore, but concentrating through it and managing precision was bloody hard. Fortunately he had practice at that too. Fighting on and doing complicated spells while wounded. Keep writing "I must not tell lies" while they craved themselves through his skin. And bonus points for multitasking by also imagining Umbridge dying in all sorts of horrible ways all the while.
Since using the half blood prince's sectumsempra slashing curse the first time he had learned and used a lot of new violent curses. It left permanent scars, he knew. But Snapes spell was unsuitable in this case as it not only cut, but slashed and did not allow for detail work or curriculum precision.
Harry used a curse that had been invented for torture and maiming rather than lethal injury. Likely made specifically to permanently brand victims with symbols or words. Precise and flexible.
scelerare sempiternus etch/defile forever
Carefully, he started cutting over his scar with his wand. Gritting his teeth at the burn, and resisting the urge to stop, he worked until he had a rather jagged slash from his hairline and slightly diagonally down to the very edge of his brow.
He cut another jagged slice ripping off a sliver of the skin to make the scar a bit wider and not just a thin slash. The blood was obscuring his wound now, and he wiped it off and smeared on a bleeding halting potion to stem the flow so he could see his result. He went over the edges a bit more where the shape still resembled the zigzag of a lightning bolt. He smeared on more potion, but nothing to heal it just yet.
His instincts were to stop and not deliberately cause more pain, but he knew getting it all over with was better than dragging it out over hours or days.
Quickly before he could think too much he flicked his wand at his nose, breaking it with a snap.
"Bollocks!" He shouted, bending over himself at the pain. Blood started dripping down his lips and chin, getting into his mouth and he quickly looked back to the mirror, blinking his tears away to try and see. He gingerly gripped his nose, and with an anguished groan he pushed it so there was an obvious bend on the bridge, and it was ever so slightly askew, but tried to make sure he wasn't narrowing his nose canal. He also didn't particularly fancy making himself ugly. While holding his nose in place he lifted his wand again. Thank Merlin he could do a simple healing spell nonverbally, as with his broken nose clogged with blood he thought he wouldn't be able to pronounce it right. He knit the bone back together, holding it firm so it couldn't straighten back out like the spell wanted.
Then he wiped the blood away with a cloth looking at his handiwork. Pretty good he thought, though it was a little swollen right now. He stuck a wad of cotton up each nostril and moved on after taking a few breaths.
Turning his wand to his ear he moaned through gritted teeth as he tried to slice surgically along the inside of the helix where any scarring wouldn't be easily visible. Only using a regular slicing spell this time, usually used for objects, not a curse, since he wasn't trying to create scars. He sliced again a little further in, coming away with a thin strip of ear, and then held the sides of the wound together and knit the skin closed. When he let go he was left with his ear looking more slim and pointed, the helix along the outer side looking more straight and square than rounded. He tried to replicate the effect on his other ear and came away with something close, but a little asymmetrical. Perfect.
Eye-catching features would take the attention away from the things he couldn't change, like the shape of his cheekbones, jaw and chin. While there probably were spells that could help him do that, altering large bonestructure like that would be extremely painful, not to mention messing with the bones on his face might make him unable to pronounce the spells right and thus cause mistakes.
He lifted his wand hand and regarded his scar on the back. "I must not tell lies". It had been a reminder to him all these years, of how people would shape their perception of him to suit their needs or wants, but also of his own rashness and temper and how it did not always serve him well to be so Gryffindor. But with little regret he switched his wand to his left hand and proceeded to cut jaggedly across the letters until they were completely obscured beneath a mess of ragged skin.
The painful part of the process over he sighed in relief, and dabbed on some more potion to halt the bleeding on his various wounds. He didn't want to mess with healing potions or spells on his scars, as most were designed to completely repair damage and he needed the scars to stick. Then he moved on to hair growing spells.
You could transfigure the shape or color of hair, but that was temporary. But predictably plenty of vain or insecure wizards who were going bald, or couldn't grow a beard had researched and invented spells to make new hair follicles, or the reverse, remove them for anyone with too much body hair he supposed. And of course making hair grow longer was easy.
This was nitpick work and he did a magnifying spell on the mirror. Concentrating on his brows first, he grew them thicker, more hairs total, and a bit further up at the arch, making them bigger, thicker, and tilted slightly more so Harry looked like he was frowning slightly.
He smirked at his reflection, thinking he looked a bit like a stereotypical evil wizard, or a mean teacher, like Snape. That had him pausing a moment. Snape was still alive here. And young. Had he even joined the Death Eaters yet at this point?
Shrugging the thought off for now, he moved on to the other brow. The scar on his forehead was a bit in the way of where his other brow ended, so the end result looked like the slice had cut off the very edge of his brow, again making them slightly asymmetrical. Perfect.
He already had shoulder length thick and unruly hair, and had grown a decent beard, so he already looked different than he had as a teen and young adult. And different than his dad had in the pictures he had seen.
The beard hid the shape of his jaw, and the long hair made his cheeks look a bit less round. A good start.
He strategically thickened and lengthened his beard on his chin to make his face look even more long and pointed. He made sure there was decent thickness all the way up to his hairline along the side of his face. He grew the length on his jaw so it looked more angular. He grew hair close enough to his lips to obscure the shape a little.
The only change he made to his hairline was giving himself a slight widows peak. Just a tuft. He left the length alone as he didn't want it annoying him, but got a hair tie and put it in a bun on top of his head making it lie a little flatter along his scalp than it usually did when it had been short and it stuck out in all directions.
Undoing the magnifying spell he looked over his face now that he had all the changes together.
It felt strange. He was used to disguising himself temporarily with transfiguration, but this was his real face. He could still see familiar features, like his eyes, but overall he didn't look like himself anymore. He might look like a relative, but he didn't think anyone would suspect him of actually being the same person.
And he was right about the mean look. He looked like a more realistic version of a kids caricature of an evil wizard. Kinda what he thought of as the perfect pureblood snob look.
Perfect for the name he had thought of to go with it.
He'd thought about it, done some research and crafted a plausible, if pretensious story.
He knew people regarded the old pureblood family names highly, even more so now than when he was at Hogwarts. With Voldemort and the war it was a turning tide, but still there were benefits to be thought to be from a prestigious line of wizards.
He couldn't use the Potter name, too many people who would say he was lying, ironically, but he knew the Potters were descended almost directly from the Peverells. The male line had died out centuries ago, so while people would be skeptical of his claim to the name, there would be no close relatives to gainsay it.
Many of the pureblood families were likely related and descended from the Peverells on the maternal side, as all the Pureblood families had intermarried at one point or another.
His story would be that his family claimed to be descended from the Peverells on the maternal side, and he had decided to claim the surname as he was proud of his prestigious heritage.
Since he was in fact a descendant, a bloodline spell should confirm he had enough Peverell blood to reasonably have a claim to the name.
He wanted to keep his first name close to his own to avoid situations where he did not recognise he was being spoken to. He figured with his new appearance, and surname it wouldn't be suspicious of him to have such a normal nickname as Harry.
He settled on Hadrian and added Antioch as his middle name. It was fitting as he had Antioch's elder wand. And conveniently the families that claimed relation to the Peverells claimed to be descended from Cadmus and Ignotus. It would throw off the scent from the Potter and Gaunt lines. He thought the name sent a message of haughty pureblood pride and a fixation on superior strength. Very death eatery of him he thought.
He didn't want to seem like a possible order sympathiser, as he'd like to be as covert as possible about destroying the horcruxes.
He figured claiming to be a descendant of Antioch Peverell would put him firmly on Voldemorts recruitment wishlist.
Heck, perhaps joining up would make it easier. He'd had good teachers in spying, manipulating, keeping secrets and playing a double agent after all. Severus Snape, Albus Dumbledore and Bartemius Crouch Jr. Aka fake Alastor Moody. And he could occlude well enough to keep Voldemort out of his head.
It was something to consider.
Now he just needed to claim his place in this world.