boy with a scar
dirgewithoutmusic
Chapter 3
Summary:
omgpadfoot asked: "What if Voldemort didn't offer Frank or Alice Longbottom a chance to sacrifice themselves for their child, his offering to spare Lily was only a whim based on a prior request to do so. What if he killed Alice and Frank without hesitation, and was able to kill defenseless little Neville. Then just to be safe, he tracked the Potter's down too. What if Snape didn't find out in time, and Lily was murdered without thought, and Harry shortly after."
Notes:
What if Voldemort went after Harry and Neville, and gave no one a chance to die for them? What if both Chosen Ones died as children?
Gosh, we didn't want to pull our punches today, did we. Okay, well, I guess here we go--
Chapter Text
Because Voldemort wasn't gone, because there was not a sudden flood of peace--they didn't send enough Aurors to take down Sirius Black.
Instead of standing laughing in the street when they came to arrest him, Sirius ran. He Apparated away and went to find Remus, because they still had work to do.
That first meeting, after Remus got the news of Peter's "death," of everyone's, was a difficult one. It was outside the wreck and ruin of the little cottage in Godric's Hollow and that only made it worse. It had been the only place Sirius had been sure Remus would go that night.
"What a Halloween, eh, Moony?" he said from the bushes and Remus almost cursed him right there, until Sirius managed to shout and dodge and wave his hands enough to explain that they'd switched the Secret Keeper. Sirius started laughing when he saw Remus start to believe him, and it wasn't the mad laughter of a man who had lost everything, because Sirius hadn't, not quite.
When Remus buried his head into Sirius's shoulder, outside the slightly smoking shell of Lily and James's home, they both cried like the children they were.
In a different world, they would have had this reunion in the scarred confines of the Shrieking Shack, thirteen years too late. In a different world, Sirius would have been gaunt, grimy, gasping with demented fury. Remus would have been washed out, threadbare. They would both have looked far too old for their ages, but there would have been a boy with messy hair and his mother's green eyes staring accusingly out at them. In a different world, Harry would have hated Sirius until he understood, and then he would have loved his godfather for the rest of his life.
If you asked them, the boys crying on Lily and James's doorstep, or the skeleton of a wanted man and the wan ghost with the beast living under his skin-- if you asked them which world they preferred, they'd have an easy answer for you.
But what did happen, in this story where they buried the Chosen Ones too early and there was no love to bring them back? They kept fighting. The war did not end. Voldemort had seven Horcruxes and he thought he was immortal. For now, he was.
In this world, there was no prophesied boy. Love was not magic; it was only soft touches and quiet words, promises they could not promise to keep. An extra piece of chocolate tucked into a packed lunch. A mother's favorite earrings passed down and down, hand to hand. Love was not magic. It did not resurrect.
Halloween Night 1981 was one more night in a long fight, to almost everyone. This was not the first time whole families had been lost. This was not the last time they would bury children.
But that night, Augusta Longbottom withered. Peter Pettigrew shivered, somewhere, welcomed into plush halls with open arms. Petunia Dursley found only the milk on her doorstep in the morning.
When Remus took Sirius back to one of his safe houses, Remus drank the same way he had in that other reality--in mourning and not any kind of celebration. But this time, he did not drink alone.
