Chapter Text
Some would say that grief sits at the top of the list of all the things that’ll inevitably come to define you, but grief manifests in strange and different ways, influenced by the person you were before you lost something you never wanted to imagine could ever be lost.
Sometimes you come out volatile on the other side, changed in ways that defy reason, and other times it is just being quiet where once you would not have been. It is the loss of courage in the face of tragedy, of being called resilient when sometimes it is all you can do to wake up and get out of bed in the morning.
For Harry, grief manifested as a bone-deep desire to leave the wizarding world behind.
She settled for the odd rebellion of changing her name, instead.
Roseanne Harriette Potter was a name synonymous with all she had ever loved and lost, a name that branded her as the Girl-Who-Lived and as the Saviour of the Wizarding World. It was a name she desperately wanted to detach herself from, a part of her past she wanted to stay there.
(Harry could appreciate the joyous celebration of a war finally won, of feeling safe for the first time in so many years because Voldemort was well and truly gone, of being able to lay down your arms and embrace fellow survivors while raising your cups to those who didn’t make it.
What she couldn't appreciate was being put on a pedestal as the Saviour of the Wizarding World, especially not when she believed the shoe didn't particularly fit.
The horrors of war had taken more from her than just loved ones; parts of herself she’d never get back. The naivety of youth, the heart for mercy, the innocence of a life untethered by memories of everything that ever went wrong.
Mostly though, Harry just felt unmoored by the loss of Teddy, who died afraid and alone from something as human as a stroke. It was an insult, for everyone around her to die from the brutality of war, and then for her sweet boy to die quietly in his room, perpetually seven years old, as if the universe itself was mocking her for looking over her shoulder and fearing the wrong enemy.
Teddy died, and Harry’s life had been redefined.
No longer was she Harry Potter, the Girl-Who-Lived. No longer did she feel like the saviour of anything.
Now she was just tragically, heartbreakingly, a mother whose child was gone.)
She decided to take the Black name, to Kreacher’s effusive approval.
Harry has always been the name she identifies with most, and at this point in her life, it’d take some real effort and adjustment to respond to anything else, so leaving the nickname behind wasn’t really an option. Roseanne Potter, however, was a name she could more than wash her hands of.
With Kreacher’s eager input, she settled on Harriette Theodora Black. Theodora for Teddy, in a way. Her godson who never even got to turn eight.
Life moves on with or without you though, cruel and unyielding. Teddy’s death had utterly undone Harry, and yet the world kept spinning.
The sudden resolve to move Grimmauld Place nearly overwhelmed her in its intensity.
As the sole inheritor of everything Sirius Black had to his name, after he died, Harry became the only one who could alter the extensive security measures placed on Grimmauld Place over the many years of it being the ancestral home to the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Harry admittedly wasn't too knowledgeable in this regard, but her time on the run with Hermione had taught her much, and if all else failed, Kreacher was there to point her in the right direction and warn her away from the wrong one.
Having been in service to the House of Black his entire life and witness to more than anyone probably wanted him to be, there was no one else in the world more fit to help Harry with her task. Kreacher cried for ten minutes straight when she told him as much.
So Harry carefully altered ward after ward, strengthening some and disregarding others, and the very air in Grimmauld Place seemed to lighten. Her twenty-fifth birthday came and went, with Harry only half aware of the occasion.
After a bit of tinkering and a handful of weeks, she’d even managed to cast reducio (shrinking charm) on the old house. It was one of her biggest wins in those first few months, and though she’d been somewhat proud of herself for her unexpected speed in unraveling the wards enough to cast reducio on the place, she’d also been gripped by an aimless sort of frustration, because even when it was shrunken down to the size of a fingernail, Grimmauld Place still could not leave the bounds of the unplottable land it'd always sat on.
Regardless, she knew she was on the right track.
This, of course, meant that something would inevitably go wrong.
The day it happens is like any other. As per their routine for the past few weeks, come midday, Harry settles down in the drawing room with Kreacher’s faithful presence ever at her side, to once again attempt to tackle the wards that root Grimmauld Place so thoroughly to its location.
Just as she’s about ready to stop for the day because she's an embarrassing amateur in comparison to the many experts to ward the old house, and move on to less advanced pursuits, Harry feels a tug on her magic so strong she almost fears she’ll be drained dry, and before she can even do anything at all, Grimmauld Place itself is apparating with her and Kreacher inside it.
Only all of an instant passes before it’s over, and Harry is immediately gasping and frantically patting her body down to check for any chunks of missing skin before promptly bending down to do the same to Kreacher. It’s a shoulder-sagging relief when she’s able to confirm that they're both whole.
Meanwhile, the house-elf eyes his Mistress with an awed sort of look on his weathered face, truly stunned, less because of the situation they’ve found themselves in and more because his Mistress is showing such open worry for him.
It still shocks him that he has found his way into the service of a witch with a heart as kind as his Master Regulus’ was.
Harry stands up to her full height at once, not liking the idea of just sitting around when she has no idea what happened, and casts her eyes across the drawing room as if the answer to the question on the tip of her tongue will jump out at her.
“How on earth can a house apparate, Kreacher?” Because that was unmistakably the nearly-squeezed-into-nonexistence sensation of apparition. Harry looks down at the elf, bewilderment splashed across her face. “Let alone with us inside of it?”
“Kreacher doesn't know,” Kreacher admits, wringing his hands.
Harry sighs in a forceful effort to stay calm. “I'm gonna try figure out what happened while you check the house, okay? I can't say I know how apparating would affect it.”
Just as she intended, Kreacher seamlessly picks up on her calm and regains his usual air of stiff deference. He's undeniably at his happiest when he has an order from her to fulfil. “Of course, Mistress.”
While Kreacher scurries off to do as asked, Harry cautiously walks to the window that overlooks the front of the house, and her mouth falls open around a breathless exhale of pure confusion, for what greets her is not the view of the muggle street Grimmauld Place resides on. There’s not even any evidence of the endless construction that always seems to be going on across the street.
Instead of a narrow London street lined with identical brick townhouses, there’s a small loop driveway curving around a small island in front of the house, and everything looks expansive and impossibly foreign, as if Grimmauld Place has embedded itself in the heart of some affluent muggle estate.
Given that the old place had somehow apparated, no doubt in response to her prying into wards better seen to by someone more well versed in them, it makes sense that she sees nothing familiar out the window, but it leaves her feeling wrong-footed, like she’s been displaced in a way that isn’t exactly reversible.
A whisper darts by her ears, an amalgamation of every octave and every pitch any given voice could ever reach.
The hairs on the back of her neck raise. “What?” She croaks.
Another eerie overlapping of a thousand different voices, all fragmented, this one closer and accompanied by the impression of memories not her own being nudged into her mind's eye.
Harry winces against the onslaught, knowing from experience that no amount of occlumency (closing one's mind against legilimency: navigation through another person's mind) can deter Death’s mental assault. They never aim to hurt her, for to harm their Master would be tantamount to sacrilege, so Harry simply deals with the occasional intrusion with as much grace as she can muster.
Death only really speaks to her when they know that their Master is in need of their unique brand of worldly knowledge, so Harry always affords their words the respect and careful consideration they’re due.
“A different universe and time travel? That’s insane,” she whispers, bald denial colouring her features and refusals aplenty on the tip of her tongue.
There’s a beat of silence where Harry can physically sense Death’s hesitation to displease their Master, and then they seem to settle on something else to say. She shivers at the hoarse voice that whispers right in her ear, something undeniably soft about it if you know what to listen for.
“1983?” Harry shakes her head, a blatant inability to comprehend written clear across her face. “What Earth am I from, then?”
Death’s response has a certain amused lilt to it, but Harry would probably be hard pressed to convince anyone else of that.
“It’s named for the Three Deathly Hallows? Seriously?” Even though Harry knows she won't see anything, she looks over her shoulder in the direction Death’s presence emanates from, and is predictably greeted by nothing.
Death’s reply echoes off the walls in an endless cacophony of sibilant laughter.
If nothing else, Harry’s mood has been lifted. Death is not exactly pleasant company, which is pretty much a given, but when they visit her to impart upon her some much needed wisdom, there's always a certain levity to it that she’ll admit she appreciates.
Harry is glad she wasn't raised religious, for having a crisis of faith after meeting Death would’ve been the final nail in the proverbial coffin. Even she knows how unnatural it is for a concept as black as death to have a physical form and an honest to Merlin sense of humour.
“Clever,” Harry says with a short laugh. Death must have an ego larger than life if every one of their ideas behind the name of her original Earth all revolve around them. She supposes it's merited though, for a being as ubiquitous as Death.
Just then, Kreacher creeps back into the room on silent, bare feet, the creak of the door opening the only real indicator of his arrival.
“Mistress Black," Kreacher acknowledges with a short bow of his head and a furtive glance to the corner of the room exuding pure dread and disquiet in a way that can only mean Death.
“Kreacher.” Harry’s face lights up with a small smile.
Kreacher squirms, nervous because of the larger presence in the room that he can only feel because he and Death share the same master, and shy because his Mistress honours him greatly with her freely given smiles.
During his time in servitude to the Noble House of Black, not even his Mistress Walburga had ever smiled at Kreacher so. Master Regulus had, rare as they were, but they'd always been cheeky with the mischief of youth, and then as he grew older and had to face everything life threw at him head on, his Master Regulus’ smiles had become fewer and farther between.
No one else has ever looked at Kreacher and smiled at him with something as unexpected as love.
“Kreacher is finding no splinching on Grimmauld Place,” the house-elf says in his typical stilted manner. “But everything is being changed. The old levels is folding into wings and hidden rooms, but it is as his Mistress and Kreacher hoped. In one piece.”
A weight Harry wasn’t even aware was there lifts off her shoulders. She didn’t have much time with Sirius, and even though she knows he wasn’t particularly fond of this house or attached to it in any significant way, it is a piece of him she nevertheless wishes to preserve.
This house was also Teddy’s childhood home and the only place where she can really feel his presence as a result, which hurts beyond words in the same breath that she doesn't think she’d survive not being able to live here anymore.
There's a special sort of solace to be found in this place. Echoes of the wonderful life Teddy got to live for just seven years.
The marks Harry had cut into the drawing room doorframe with a simple diffindo charm (severing charm) to track Teddy’s growth. The bedroom on the second floor Teddy had claimed as his own because he found childish glee in being able to quickly run and hide in his room after bending at the waist over the bannister and scaring the living daylights out of Harry when she thought he’d plummet down to the first floor. The artwork Teddy had decorated the walls with after Harry had Kreacher remove all the portraits and shrunken house-elf heads and do with them as he pleased. And so much more.
So no, Harry isn't ready to part with Grimmauld Place. Not when she has so much of Teddy left in it. Not when it’s undeniable proof that she had a son.
“Good,” she says simply.
Kreacher nervously shuffles in place and is about to ask if his Mistress needs him for anything else, but she is already speaking, though not to him.
“Is there a way back?”
A chill runs down Kreacher’s spine at the empty silence that answers his Mistress’ question, both because it is an unnatural silence that shouldn't be allowed to exist, and because of the very question that was asked.
“When I said I wanted to get away from the wizarding world, this is absolutely not what I meant.” Harry tries for a lighthearted tone and manages it by the skin of her teeth. “How can there be no way back.” It is a quiet demand for an answer.
Harry stares unseeingly into the middle distance, struggling to wrap her head around Death’s parting words overflowing with a world of implications, her mind working overtime to break it down.
It’s not that there’s no way back, but that the circumstances that landed her and Kreacher in this new time and dimension in the first place cannot even begin to be recreated.
Grimmauld Place’s wards had been put in place by many a Black witch and wizard, reinforced every now and again and being joined by new wards whenever the head of the family saw fit to add more, with no real ledger to keep track of them all. Due to the very nature of the wards being that they would not be nullified by the death of the caster but rather only weakened, they’d had more than two-hundred years to accumulate excess magic, idly siphoning it from the many creatures that’d been purposely put in the house.
Creatures that Harry and the Weasleys had long since gotten rid of.
Considering the amount of magic the wards had managed to stockpile for no other reason than because nothing in their design prevented them from doing so, they probably could've lasted at least another century or so all on their own before the integrity of them began degrading without a passive source of magic to take from.
But of course, ever cursed with bad luck, Harry had kickstarted the process completely by accident.
Even if she had the know how to recreate the wards exactly as they had been, her and Kreacher combined don't have the kind of magic at their disposal that would guarantee the same exact results, not to mention that she still has no idea what she even did to trigger the house into apparating in the first place.
She sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose and taking a heavy seat down on the couch.
“We’re stuck here, Kreacher,” she informs tiredly. “In a time and on an Earth not our own.”
“Kreacher don’t be knowing if his Mistress is certain?” The house-elf wrings his hands, apprehensive.
“I’m certain,” Harry says softly.
“Kreacher doesn’t…” he trails off, visibly stricken.
Harry holds her hand out, palm up, and waits for Kreacher to reverently take it with a trembling hand before she shares what Death had hesitated to even tell her.
“Wizardkind does not exist here.”
Kreacher’s hand spasms before he’s crowding up into her space, his free hand desperately finding purchase on her knee. What comes out of his mouth next is a mess of aborted words, and Harry’s heart clenches when she sees the tears building in his eyes.
“Kreacher,” she starts, sliding off the couch to crouch down in front of him. She grasps both of his small, spindly hands in her own, green eyes running over his distraught face. “Don’t cry. Please.” Harry’s eyebrows pull up in the middle as her own uncertainty over the situation rushes to the forefront. “We’ll be okay.”
“I…” Kreacher can’t seem to find his words, and then all at once, his face is crumbling as he bursts into tears, his whole body shaking with the force of his sobs.
Harry brings him into a hug with no hesitation, which predictably sends him into another wave of hysterics, and stubbornly works to fight off her own tears while rubbing soothing circles into his back.
She wishes she was still afflicted with the kind of mistrustful yet optimistic naivety that would've had her denying Death’s parting words and going off on her own to look for other witches and wizards, but if Death says there is no wizarding world secreted away here on this unfamiliar Earth, in a year where she is only meant to be three-years-old, then Harry is inclined to believe them, for they have never led her astray before.
It’s a good ten minutes, perhaps even more, before Kreacher calms down enough to pull away with a heartfelt apology for getting his Mistress’ clothes wet with his sorrow. Harry waves it off.
“Kreacher—" He takes a hitching breath. “Kreacher is sad that his Mistress is being alone now.”
Harry hasn't quite had the chance to think of it like that yet, but having it stated so plainly, so factually, is eye opening, to say the least.
At least she still has Kreacher, who would follow her with blind faith to the ends of the Earth if she so asked. He may be older than her by more than the average wizard lifespan, but she’s still protective of him in a way that she only ever was with Teddy.
It both hurts and warms her heart when he sheds tears for her. He’s a weathered house-elf who has been through much, yet he still manages to open his heart up to her everyday.
"I have you, Kreacher." She holds Kreacher's face in her hands, thumbing away his tears. "I’m not alone."
Kreacher is inconsolable for half an hour before calming down with a solemn vow that no matter what comes, he will be there with her through it.