Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past
By Viridian
"Harry jammed the diary onto one of the sabre-like fangs, right through the bloody hand-print he’d left on the cover." Please tell me this is Chekhov's gun.
Where Harry asks about why he didn't use the Marauder's Map when looking for Ginny before, he did have a good reason....he didn't get it until the next year.
I wonder how you're occlumency is...that line should be avoided from here on just for the sake of the audience's sanity.
~Matt
I'm not sure what you mean by that...
Bizarre font change at "By the time they returned" ...
This is without a doubt my favorite chapter of the entire story. We really get to see Harry let loose and show what a badass he is, and I enjoy every moment of it. Also, Draco's taken down a peg,
Snape's sacked, we get some emotional revelations, there's a great Luna moment or two, etc. etc.
What I'm saying is this chapter is everything I could want in fanfiction and then some. Well, it's not Harry/Luna, but really, shipping is such a secondary concern in the scheme things.
Outstanding chapter. Really like the way you took care of the Malfoys. Very good with Dobby too.
gunny
Brilliant, brilliant, BRILLIANT!
Dealing with Lucius, getting rid of Draco and Snape, freeing Dobby, telling his friends, getting their absolution, and letting Ginny ask the question so simply and answering his unasked
question with equal ease - - -THIS WAS A FABULOUS CHAPTER!
Major kudos to you.
Thanks!
Glad you liked it... though I think I'm going to have trouble topping this one...
I loved the wrap up for the second year and I am looking forward to your further work :-)
Great chapter :) Please, please don't let this story be an abandoned one, it's really quite brilliant and deserves to be ended well, when the story gets there :)
As a complete masterpiece.
> By the time they returned to their dormitories, Harry could barely stand. He checked the damaged trunk, a let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. The Glock was still where he’d left it,
under some of his first year books, wrapped in one of Vernon ’s old socks. After re-packing it, Harry collapsed onto his bed, still half-dressed, and pulled the curtains shut. Sleep overcame
him with the drone of conversation still filling his ears.
This section, which you added after you realized Harry has to check for the gun, is still written in a different font. While you fix that, you can also replace the 'a' with an 'and' in the second
sentence.
I had to read the chapter again, since between the amount of fics I read, the length of the story and the time between updates the details of what happened in the chapter get muddy over time. You
update fast enough, but it is still long enough that I feel I have to refresh my knowledge of the events that happened. Well, time to check out the latest chapter!
Quizer
The end felt a bit awkward- after all, when Harry died, he wasn't really with Ginny, nor was ginny when she died. Of course, they weren't exactly friends either. But more than friends? hum...
Here's a thought. Now that Harry knows about the Map, and everyone knows how he knows about the Map, he ought to get Remus and Sirius to teach them how to make their own. Partly so that they can
have one while the twins have the original, or they can even each have one, and partly so that they can add things like the Chamber of Secrets, the Room of Requirements, and any secret passageways or
whatnot that Harry knows about that the original Marauders never found. They could even make a Map of the Burrow, just in case. With that, the wards, and a few dozen fire-proofing spells, I have no
doubt that Harry's nightmares about the Burrow would greatly decrease as it becomes less and less possible for them to become a reality.
I also would like to cast my vote for the group learning to be animagi at some point. Another just-in-case thing - having a form in which one could escape in would help a lot.
Anyway, really great work! I love this, and I'm likely going to keep reviewing random chapters with even more random thoughts until you update another chapter so I have something else to think
about!
I like it!! Please Keep up the good work.
Tim
Hey, Matthew! This is a wonderful story, one of the better 'redo' stories. Any idea how long until the next chapter comes out?
Ron
getting to be a good story, keep up the awesome work
Hey that was a great chapter, best one yet in my opinion. I can't believe his friends are handling it so well...
Also I look forward to "20 questions for future harry" that comes later.
Although its your story I have to point out the one flaw with it, don't know if this has been said before. Harry being vastly mature I can understand. Ron turning a bit more mature because of harry I
can understand. The one that seems really out of place in terms of maturity is Ginny. I mean sure I don't think she'd be whining like a 5 year old, but she just seems a bit too mature for the
age.
But hey I guess with this timeline that you set up she had to be, it just bugged me a bit.
Great story I look forward to what is next.
- Chris
Still good. Writing, plot, charcters.. all awsome.. so keep it up!
Excllent Story, I look forward to the final touches to this year. Do you have this story posted anywhere else, by chance? I cannot remember if I saw it somewhere else as well.
I think, when Harry finally reveals himself to Dumbledore, or at least a part of himself, the first words out of his mouth should be something along the lines of "The word you're looking for is Horcrux, sir. Or is it Horcruces? There are, after all, six of them!" The ideal thing, of course, would be to have Dumbledore destroy them, or at least, most of them before the Third Task. Then in the Graveyard Harry can Kill Nagini (or he may not have to if you follow the line that he didn't turn Nagini into the Horcrux until after the Graveyard - only Harry knows)and then Thrash Moldy Shorts in front of all his Vaunted Death Eaters!
Interesting turn of events you had here. Have to admit that I loved it though.
I found your way of having Harry reveal the big secret to be well done. I'm sure you've been told this, but you do tend to have the major events play out. They may not have gone the same way,
but they did happen.
As for Draco's expulsion, it's fitting. There was enough evidence to implicate him of being at least a party to two counts of attempted murder, but not enough to stand in court. Also, I have a
feeling that Lucious Malfoy is about to have a slight drop in influence, especially since many believe that it was his idea to send the dementors to Hogwarts. We'll see how it turns out.
As for how you handled Snape, I liked it. He was caught in a situation which Dumbledore had no choice but to fire him. He was indirectly tied to a case of the attempted murder of one of his students.
This at least gave Dumbledore a way of sacking him without risking him. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that he will be teaching at Durmstrang at some point?
Well, you plainly said that the entire canon story is going into the circular file from this point on, so I lookm forward to the next chapter.
WTF?! The "agent" has access to the Chamber of Secrets? What the bloody 'ell is going on here?
Oh... so Harry's been out for a month, and she got the diary... and then it got her.
You'd think Harry would have though to use mirrors or some sort of lens to protect himself and the others from the basilisk's gaze -- after all, petrification is reversible, death is not.
"This ponce is Voldemort?" ROFLMAO!
Okay, why not just hit the basilisk with an Avada Kedavra and have done with it? At this point, letting his friends know he's capable of the Killing Curse seems like the lesser evil by far.
"At least we’re in an appropriate place." Another belly laugh -- what a wonderful bit of mordant wit, having Harry finally reveal his secrets in the Chamber of Secrets.
You managed to move me to tears with Harry's friends reaction to his revelations -- even though I knew they would react that way, being the people they are both in canon and here. JKR herself only accomplished that maybe five or six times in the series. Not always at the places everyone expects, either -- I think the most affecting scene in the series, for me, was Kreacher's account of Regulus' death; a close second was when Dumbledore said, "I am not worried, Harry. I am with you." That was the moment I knew for certain he was going to die that night, and it hit me much harder than his actual death in the following chapter -- the torch had passed.
“What does it look like from your end of time?” Have you ever read Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere?" This version of Luna occasionally calls to mind one of the terrifying Mr. Croup's better lines: "Some of us are so sharp, we could just cut ourselves." Asking questions about the future is almost as dangerous a business as making three wishes, although it's mitigated some by the fact that the future under discussion can -- indeed, has -- been changed.
"Now drop the cloak before I get creative." Heh -- another example of Harry sounding like Miles Vorkosigan. Miles is a master of that sort of non-specific threat, all the scarier because of it's latitude. One of his best lines is "Ivan... are you challenging my ingenuity?" Knowing just what havoc Miles' ingenuity can wreak, his cousin Ivan backs down instantly.
"There are far worse ways to die. You’re probably going to discover one or two." Kickass! I was chanting an exultant "yes, yes, yes!" throughout this scene, but that was the icing on the cake. Of course, Draco's expulsion still leaves "the agent in place" in place -- he, whoever he is, is the real threat, and it's not at all clear that this outcome even represents a failure of his scheme -- it depends on how much of a Xanatos Gambit he's really running.
"Harry frowned. She must have already been affected by the Diary, he mused." You know, sometimes even this version of Harry can be amazingly obtuse...
"And after that, Fred and I will do things to them that Harry’s too nice to think of." Heh. The twins haven't a clue just how not-nice Harry can be... but on the other hand, they may well be able to come up with things that never would have occurred to him, just because his sense of humor isn't quite as warped as theirs.
“It means fewer people I’ll have to kill later on." Very, very blunt, but the subject under discussion was a good reason for Harry to show his friends a bit of just how ruthless he had to become in the dark future he hopes to avert.
It's a pity Harry didn't have time to grab the Glock before going down to the Chamber of Secrets -- he could probably have done more damage faster to the basilisk with an unlimited supply of 9mm bullets than with curses. Ah, well, it worked out anyway.
One quibble I have with the use of curses in this story, and others I've read, is that it appears to me that in canon, Reducto and Diffindo only affect inanimate objects. Snape used Reducto to blow up rosebushes in the garden after the Yule ball with no concern about blowing the students under them to a bloody pulp, and from the results it appeared he had no reason for concern; Harry had D.A. member practicing it where it might have hit other members, and the Hex used it to smash shelves in the Department of Mysteries with no concern about hitting each other (also, if it was capable of wounding, they'd have been better off using it to smash Death Eaters).
We've seen Harry use Diffindo on Cedric's bookbag to slow him down so that Harry could catch up and tell him about the dragons, on the tentacles of the brain that attacked Ron in the DoM, and on the chains holding Mrs. Cattermole to the defendant's chair in the Wizengamot courtroom, while Hermione used it to cut Ron free of the spell ropes one of the Death Eaters in the café fight wrapped around him. In no case did the spell accidentally cut the flesh adjacent to its inanimate target, and nowhere in canon is either spell used to harm a living person or animal. Furthermore, there is a canonical spell that does do what you have Diffindo doing to living flesh in this story: Sectumsempra.
I think that Rowling's type of magic treats the living tissues of animals (though not plants) as qualitatively different from inanimate matter; magic that affects one typically ignores the other. This also explains why Avada Kedavra, which slays any living target without fail and passes through shielding charms as though they weren't there, can nonetheless be blocked by a solid object -- a statue, a wooden table, etc.
Lovely H/G sweetness at the end of this chapter. I'm thinking, though, that if I were writing a story like this, being the H/C shipper I am, I would posit that Harry reconnected with Cho some time after the Massacre (she wouldn't have been at Hogwarts then, having graduated in HBP), and they had a relationship that gave Harry some respite from the darkness of his losses and his quest, until she was killed. That would leave him puzzling over which of the two girls he had loved in the previous timeline to pursue in the new one -- plenty of opportunities for angst, there. I expect he'd still end up choosing Ginny, because he has no intention of letting Cedric die this time around, and he knows that Cho would be happy with Cedric.