Chapter 1
“It’s been a Morbin’ time,” Morbius said to Neo as he jumped in the path of the silver bullet bound for the Chosen One. As a vampire, Morbius had a long life behind him, and he was fully willing to up his life in exchange for Neo being able to free humanity from the shackles of the machines. He smiled softly as he bled out onto the floor. Neo yelled, “Morbius!” as Morbius’ body started turning to dust, but he didn’t have time to cry over the corpse of his best friend. He could avenge Morbius in the battle to come.
(─‿‿─)
Morbius Snape didn’t expect to wake up, but he did, stirred by a yell and the smell of stale alcohol. When his eyes snapped open, it didn’t take him long to identify that the source of both was his father. His father who was very very dead. Before Tobias Snape could react to his son waking up, Morbius was already morbing. He didn’t know how he was alive, but waking up to his father meant that the machines had him, and they were trying to throw him off his game. Morbius refused to be thrown off his game. He melted into the writhing energy of the morb, and for an instant and an eternity he was calm. He was the morb and the morb was him. Pure morb energy. Morbergy. When he came to, he was standing in the sun on a pile of rubble on the end of Spinner’s end.
He instantly knew that something was wrong.
There were no Smiths popping out of the splintered pieces of wood to taunt him. Standing in the sun was causing him a familiar discomfort that he hadn’t felt in years. His head was not bald and he was quite a bit shorter than he usually imagined himself.
Morbius startled as a horrified, “Morbius?” was heard behind him.
He snapped around like a whip, another morb on his fingertips. He never could have morbed the person he saw, however. A young Lily Evans stood in his former home’s driveway, her childishly round face looking up at him with a mix of concern and shock. Morbius thought she looked smaller than he remembered.
“What- what happened, Morb?” Lily asked. “Are you okay? Is your family okay?”
Morbius could not help but stare at her. She wasn’t exactly how he imagined, and she didn’t seem wrong in the way that most of the machines’ recreations from memory did. For a small moment, Morbius dared to hope that she was real.
For the first time in a long time, he tested whether or not he was in the Matrix, drawing on his magic to form a wandless lumos. When he saw the simple spell flicker to life, his already pale skin paled even further. Magic didn’t work in the Matrix; the machines couldn’t simulate it. This meant that somehow, he was really in the past, and he really had just killed his entire family.
Morbius had only ever really wanted his father dead; his mother and brother had never been nearly as bad as he was. Milo had grown up to be an asshole, but Morbius had always thought that with a second chance, he could have shaped him into a decent person. This clearly wasn’t to be, however.
“I don’t know what happened. I don’t think my family is alive, though,” Morbius said to Lily, frantically trying to figure out how to get out of murdering his family without being sent to Azkaban.
“We… we need to call the cops right? So they can dig them out of the rubble? Maybe they’re alive but trapped down there?” she said with a questioning tone. Morbius couldn’t help but think that she had a long way to go before she became the woman that had once defied Voldemort.
It was then that it hit Morbius that the Lily in front of him wasn’t his Lily, just as his family that he killed weren’t the same family he had grown up with. They had the potential to become the people Morbius had known, but Morbius could never have had the same relationship with them, knowing what he knew about the future. He chided himself for holding out hope that the Lily he loved was anything but gone.
“Since this involves magic we should call the aurors,” Morbius replied. Really, given his situation he shouldn’t have suggested that, but dealing with the emotional impact of losing his family for a second time was distracting.
Morbius snapped himself to focus. The magical signature of morbing was very specific and could be traced to him easily, so he couldn’t let his magical signature be read unless he had a very convincing cover story. He was underage so his house falling could be filed under accidental magic, but since it killed people, it was going on his record and he was going to be watched very closely for the rest of his life anyways.
Really, if he wanted to remain free and unscrutinized, he was going to have to fake his death and forge a new identity. This was a tactic that he was quite comfortable with, really. He’d done it before, and he remembered a guy in Knockturn who could change your name in magic.
For all that he knew exactly how to get a new identity, the first step of faking your death and changing identities was the faking your own death part, however, and Morbius was less confident in his ideas for how to do that. After thinking for a moment, he decided to go with the plan that would get him off of Spinner’s End the fastest.
“Lily stand back!” he yelled. “It- it’s happening again.”
His attempt to sound terrified was lackluster, but was going to have to do.
When Morbius saw that Lily wasn’t trying to approach him, he once again started morbing. “It’s morbin’ time,” he whispered under his breath, nostalgic for the days after his first try faking his death and hanging identities when he spent with Tyrese in Greece. It was there that the words “morbin’” and “time” were said together for the first time, now that he thought about it.
Morbius was careful not to give his entire mind to the morb. He had to be methodic, which the chaotic calm of a full morbification would not allow. He re-morbed everything in the collapsed house from the broken chairs to his father’s bones, and cut his arm so that some of his own DNA would be found in the after-morb. When he judged everything to be sufficiently unrecognizeable, he turned on his heel mid-morb and apparated to Knockturn Alley.
Horrified, Lily watched the dust settle where her friend had stood just moments before.