Summary: AU, eventual HP/DM slash, (very) Slytherin!Harry. Harry's brother Connor is the Boy-Who-Lived, and Harry has devoted himself to protecting him—by being ordinary. But certain people aren't content to let Harry hide in the shadows.
Warnings: Much more for language and violence than for sex. But it will be slash, so don't read it if if you don't like that sort of thing.
Notes: Okay, this is the first chapter of what will be, I hope, a long and complicated retelling of Harry's youth in an alternative world. There will be events, places, and people familiar from canon, but I'm not going to follow the storyline of the books completely, or even closely in many places. (There will be characters and objects mentioned from HBP in the sixth year analogue, but probably by the time I get to Harry's sixth year you'll either have read the bookor given up on the story). I've always enjoyed stories where Harry has a sibling who supposedly saved the world, and stories where Harry's Sorted into Slytherin, but most of the time all the characters except Harry wind up as caricatures of themselves. This is my attempt at writing a Slytherin Harry who's not necessarily evil, and a Snape and Draco who may be good but not nice, and a sibling (Harry's twin brother Connor) who's his own person.
I hope to do 500 words a day on it and update whenever I have a chapter completed. Feel free to kick me if I don't. I want to carry this through.
Disclaimer: The recognizable people, places, events, and spells in this story do not belong to me, but to J. K. Rowling. I'm not making a profit off this story involving them, nor claiming ownership of them.
Chapter One: Brother's Keeper
"What are your vows, Harry?"
Harry knew what they were, even though he was only five. He whispered them as his mother held him over his brother's bed, and his mother said them with him, murmured hypnotic words that Harry had heard his whole life.
"To keep Connor safe. To always protect him. To insure that he lives as untroubled a life as he can, until he has to face Lord Voldemort again." There was the pause for breath that his mother always took, as though she were frightened. Harry waited until she started speaking again, and then joined his voice to hers. "To be his brother and his friend and his guardian. To love him. To never compete with him, never show him up, and never let anyone else know that I'm so close to him. To be ordinary, so that he can be extraordinary."
Harry remembered stumbling on that last word, back on his and his brother's birthday, when his mother had first coached him into saying it and not just listening to her say it. He'd never asked what it meant, though. His parents thought he was smarter than he really was, sometimes. But now he wanted to know, so he turned around as his mother bore him towards the other bed and asked.
"Mum, what does extraordinary mean?"
Lily Evans Potter hesitated for a long moment, looking down at Harry as though she didn't know how to answer that. Then she smiled faintly, and shook her head, and sat on the bed beside him. Harry wriggled under the covers. He kept his eyes on her face, never taking them off. They both had eyes the same extreme, bright green, while Connor and their father James shared bright hazel eyes. Harry considered, in the secret box of his thoughts where he put everything he couldn't say aloud, that he and his mother had a special bond because they had the same eyes. He knew it wasn't really true, of course, not when Connor was the Boy-Who-Lived, but Harry liked to pretend, sometimes.
Lily smoothed back his fringe from the scar on Harry's forehead, absently. It was shaped like a lightning bolt. Harry knew how he'd gotten the scar—from a bit of falling rock when Voldemort attacked, on that horrible night he couldn't quite remember, when Lily and James had been lured away from home by the idea that their twin sons had already been kidnapped. Voldemort had stamped in, and shot the Avada Kedavra curse at Connor, and Connor had deflected it and destroyed him. He had a cut shaped like a heart on his forehead, a curse scar.
