unleash the furies (Harry Potter OC)
“Theodore Nott,” announced Minerva McGonagall.
Soren trailed off and looked back at the row of firsties waiting anxiously for their turn. A boy with his brown hair, the abyssal black of his eyes and his pale complexion stepped forward. There were some differences between them; the younger boy’s face was rounder, his lips fuller, and there was a single mole on his cheek where Soren had two, one under his eye and another kissing his jaw.
Cassius Warrington elbowed him, “That your little brother?”
He hummed. “Yeah, that’s Theo.”
He tapped a finger against the side of his glass, watching his little brother sit on the stool.
“He’s tiny,” commented Adrian Pucey on his other side.
Elsie Lament cooed. Irene Merrythought grinned and said with a conspiratorial smirk, “he’s cute. He’ll grow up to be a charmer, if he’s anything like you.”
Soren did not dignify that with a response, which made his friends snort.
“SLYTHERIN!”
Theo took off the hat, his expression neutral, and walked up to his brother, who had led his group next to the other first years on purpose. The seat next to him was even empty; with a quirk of his eyebrow, he dared anyone to say anything against it. The Malfoy heir twitched, visibly wanting to speak up. Soren stared him down until the boy lowered his eyes. Soren glanced away, satisfied to know the lesson had stuck.
“Tillykke, lillebror,” he murmured as his brother sat down.
Congratulations, little brother.
Theo rolled his eyes, though some tension seemed to leave his shoulders.
“The only thing I did was put on a hat.”
“You got into your preferred House. Let me be happy for you,” he said, poking his little brother between the brows.
Theo made a face. He murmured in Danish, “if it was up to me, I’d be in Ravenclaw, you know this.”
“I know,” he replied in the same language, his smile taking on a bittersweet edge. “But you still thought Slytherin was preferrable to accomplish your goals and you got what you wanted. It’s a victory.”
Theo worried his lip between his teeth. Soren resisted the urge to pull on his cheek to make him stop as he used to at home. Showing favouritism was one thing, babying his little brother in front of his peers was another.
“Slytherin won’t be so bad if you’re in it,” mumbled his little brother, turning away to watch the rest of the Sorting.
Soren chuckled, but he gazed back at his friends who were giving him space to talk to Theo without interruption.
“Sage, your cousin’s getting Sorted too,” was saying Cassius as Pansy Parkinson made her way to the stool. “Are you hoping she’ll join us?”
Sage theatrically shuddered which made Prudence Bulstrode, his fiancee laugh.
“Absolutely not. The little pest is a nightmare to be around.”
Their year group in Slytherin was quite small in comparison to other years, a consequence of the war against Voldemort.
And still, having three female and four male students was impressive considering the year above only counted five students overall. For all his talk about the preservation of lineage, Voldemort sure had ended a lot of family lines.
Soren had been surprised when he’d realised how easy it was to rally the students around him. As the Heir of House Nott, he might outrank most of them except Prudence and Sage who stood as Heirs to their own Houses, but he hadn’t known if it would truly matter. Wixen children didn’t interact with the outside world before getting their Hogwarts letter and, isolated as he was, getting a feel for his peers had been a trial and error. Besides, he was no Draco Malfoy as a first year, neither as confident of his own superiority nor as domineering.
But according to Sage, it was his quiet charisma and his focused character that had attracted them to him. He’d made sure to drag them all with him to the top of the rankings, and in a year group where the only people who stood out in other Houses were the academically disinclined Weasley twins, his influence had been noticed. They called him and the seven Slytherin friends he had made himself a Coven. He wasn’t sure what to think of that.
There were weird rumours about them, though Soren didn’t pay attention to them much. He had been more focused on making sure that the cesspit that was the den of snakes was presentable for his brother’s arrival. It had taken some effort, but he’d browbeaten all students except the sixth and seventh years, who didn’t care about anything but their upcoming NEWTs. Some hadn’t taken much effort, like the fifth years led by Gemma Fawley, but students like Marcus Flint had needed a public humiliation to fall in line, which had forced Soren to show off a lot more than he had intended to.
But there was no way the third year would allow Theo to sleep in a place where prejudice and bullying ran rampant, and if their father insisted on both of his sons being in Slytherin, Soren would at least make sure their House would be up to his standards.
And now he would get to see if his little experiment would measure up to Draco Malfoy’s influence and the backing of the kid’s father. He had one year to make sure it would; next year, all his attention would be taken up by a dangerous enterprise, namely getting answers from a teenage Dark Lord.
***
He died and found himself in a great big room full of tapestries.
On each of them was depicted a different story he remembered being told, no matter the medium. Books, films, songs, hearsay and folk legends. The more popular stories were made of stronger, brighter threads, strengthened as they were by the many hands and voices that added to the tale. And because a certain cursed author sold her story to hundreds of millions, that of the Wizarding World was the strongest of all.
He supposed these stories were a way to soothe the deceased, provide something familiar before the next great adventure. They couldn’t exactly play every music you’d ever listened to, could they? And showing you images of your own youth was rather creepy, most people would probably pass on that.
So, he was there, among all those beautiful tapestries. There were thousands of them; he’d always been a bookworm. He admired them, oohing and aahing at the pretty pictures like he’d reverted to a three-year-old. He had a grand old time, reminiscing about his favourite stories and resolutely ignoring the truth of his death.
But the problem was, you see, that when he was growing up, they called him Magpie.
“Can’t stop himself from putting his grubby fingers on anything shiny, that one,” would say his grandmother, her mouth slanted into a scoff and her head shaking in exasperation.
She wasn’t wrong; he certainly couldn’t stop gravitating towards things that caught his attention. And the greedy, grasping little thing that he was would put anything that would fit in his pocket.
He learnt a few things about ownership and boundaries later on, but it took a little time for the lesson to stick.
And he supposed that, shocked as he was by his rather sudden death, he forgot about those pesky things for a mo’ when he got to this hall of stories, and his nail snagged on the thread depicting the birth of Tom Riddle when he had simply wanted to trace the pretty picture.
Some kind of hook dug into his navel and dragged him forward, and when he woke up, he was in the body of Soren Nott, Theodore Nott’s older brother who was meant to be stillborn and to leave Theo as the Heir of House Nott.
Why would he know that, you ask?
Because Fate made him a Seer to punish him for fucking up his own intended afterlife.
He saw what was and what should have been, what the future would be if he didn’t take it upon himself to change it. Soren didn’t care, at first. He had only mild distaste for his Death Eater father, too tired to summon true hatred for the man even after he killed Theo and Soren's mother in front of them. He contented himself with protecting Theo and planning their escape to the continent when the time came. He had Seen what his brother would have become under the tutelage of the Carrows, and he didn’t intend to let the only person he loved in this world turn himself into a monster to survive.
He didn’t plan to stick around after reaching adulthood; he’d be seventeen in December 1994, and he’d be able to take Theo with him.
Of course, Fate had other ideas.
“No,” she hissed in his sleep, trailing long, sharp fingers on his cheek. “You disrupted my tapestry; you will fix it.”
And he was assaulted with images of what would happen to Theo if he dared step foot outside Britain before Voldemort was killed.
“What did I do?” he’d pled. “What did I change? Tell me and I’ll fix it.”
Fate cackled.
“I won’t make it easy for you, child. Figure it out, or your brother will pay the price.”
He spent what should have been peaceful childhood years sifting through his visions, trying to spot where things had gone wrong exactly. It got so bad that their father noticed, though he attributed it to nightmares caused by his memories of the night the man killed their mother. Soren thanked his luck that the man hadn’t noticed his oldest son was a Seer tormented by Fate herself or he had no idea what might have happened to him. As it was, Theophrastus Nott had no qualms feeding him Dreamless Sleep potions until he got addicted to them and had to be slowly weaned off them before he entered Hogwarts.
After all these years, Soren only had one answer; something had changed at the birth of Tom Riddle which turned Voldemort into a different kind of genocidal maniac. The man was as drunk on power and Dark Magic as he had been in the Future that Should Have Been, but his views on Blood Purity were surprisingly tempered. From what he had Seen of the First War, Death Eaters targeted muggle-borns and squibs a lot less than they did opposing Light families, and what they sought to accomplish remained a mystery to the rest of Wizarding Britain. The man even had muggle-borns in his ranks.
Soren didn’t know why this change bothered Fate so much, but it seemed like she wanted a specific thing to happen that wouldn’t if Voldemort remained on this path. He had no idea how to fix it, but it seemed like his visions wouldn’t be enough. Image-based as they were, they didn’t provide him any insight into the thought process of someone as mercurial as a Dark Lord.
The diary of Tom Riddle might be his only way to get better answers.