Up high in the Headmaster's Office, Albus Dumbledore released a weary sigh as he stared out of his window at the starry night sky. The start-of-term feast had ended mere moments ago, and he couldn't believe how much had changed in such a short span of time, all of it starting with and revolving around Hardwin Potter.
Albus would be lying to himself if he said he hadn't forgotten about the boy—old age tended to do things like that to the mind.
But seeing him again tonight…
He had, upon seeing the boy's state in comparison to that of his twin brother, felt immediate regret over his decision to mention to James and Lily Potter the challenge of raising two boys in the same household when one was hailed as the magical world's saviour, the famous Boy Who Lived. Albus had believed that the Hardwin would not appreciate being forgotten by most of the world while Evan thrived in the spotlight, so he had not argued enough when Lily suggested they send Hardwin to her sister, which would allow them to keep Hardwin in their lives without burdening him the same issues his brother would suffer through as a child celebrity.
Albus had heard many rumours about Petunia Dursley since Lily had first come to Hogwarts—he had written the letter that denied her admittance to Hogwarts, after all—and he had had his doubts about whether or not she could be considered a suitable guardian for a wizard, but Lily had been so sure that whatever issues the two sisters had been between them were in the past, that they had decided to let bygones be bygones when they attended each other's weddings.
Oh, how wrong that assumption was.
Lily and James had visited the Dursley household several times in the first few years of their sons' lives, making sure that Hardwin was being cared for, but James had grown busy with his work as an Auror for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, leaving Lily on her own to raise the son that remained with them. Unfortunately, Evan Potter very much took after his father and got himself into all sorts of mischief growing up, which had consumed all of poor Lily's time and she had been unable to visit Hardwin anymore.
Albus had offered to place a squib friend of his—Arabella Figg—in the neighborhood to keep an eye on the boy for her, but Lily had insisted that it was fine and she trusted Petunia.
Albus should have pushed the issue harder.
He rubbed his eyes as he sighed again—he was growing far too old to be dealing with these issues again, but he didn't have a choice. A Potter in Slytherin! This was unprecedented in Hogwarts' entire history — every single Potter since the founding of the school had been in Gryffindor, or so the rumours went. No one could be sure just how true that was because of the lack of written record.
Albus should have offered to let another member of the Order raise Hardwin instead of sending him to the muggles. He was honestly surprised that Sirius Black hadn't offered to help the family of his best friend, but the man had never truly grown out of his teen years and Albus shuddered to think of how his school would survive with a boy just as troublemaking as Evan Potter—another member of the second generation of Marauders.
Fawkes, Albus' phoenix companion, cooed a song note that made his heart seem lighter.
"I hope this mistake can be fixed, Fawkes," Albus said quietly. "Before it is too late. This world cannot handle another Tom Riddle—not when Voldemort is still out there, weakened as he may be…"
The phoenix trilled sadly.
"I know," Albus sighed. "But at least Severus can keep a close watch on Hardwin. Perhaps a man who has sought redemption for himself can help to guide another on the path to the Light. There is no one I would trust more with this task than him—I just pray he is capable of setting aside his long-held grudge against James Potter for the greater good. It would not do to be fighting amongst ourselves when there is a far greater enemy out there."
The red star Albus knew to be Mars shimmered brightly.
"The time for the second war is coming much sooner than I had hoped," he lamented gravely. "I do not think the world will be ready, Fawkes. As much as we have prepared, we have also fallen far behind — I just don't know anymore…"
All Albus could do was pray things changed for the better before the war arrived.
The Slytherin common room was a long, low space with stone walls and a cold atmosphere. Lanterns hung from the ceiling and cast an eerie green glow across the room, amplified by the presence of the lake above them due to their depth in the dungeons. Several armchairs and a couch surrounded an ornate fireplace with a fancy marble mantelpiece, above which hung a portrait of the founder—a slim man with a bald head, a long, silver beard, and piercing grey eyes.
Harry was immediately faced, however, with the expectant faces of his new Housemates, each of whom looked as if they had countless questions to ask him.
"So," a boy from the older years said slowly. "Another Potter."
Harry said nothing; merely stared at the boy.
"Why haven't we heard of you before?" a girl sneered, her dark eyes filled with disgust as she looked down her nose at Harry like he was the scummiest thing she had ever seen. "Surely a Potter would be impossible to hide with the Boy Who Lived strutting around."
"Given how I didn't even know the other Potters existed," Harry drawled, trying not to wince at the flare of pain in his back and wrists, "I would assume that it is quite the simple task."
"What?" the fifth-year prefect interjected. Gemma Farley was a tall girl with cold blue eyes and long, braided dark hair draped over one shoulder. Harry could see that she wasn't someone easily fooled after a single glance. "Did you truly not know about them?"
"No, I didn't."
"How is that possible?" asked the boy, looking confused. "Everyone knows about Evan Potter."
"Except for someone who grew up outside the magical world," another boy said thoughtfully. "Lady Potter's a muggleborn, remember? Maybe the Potter right here grew up with her family to keep him out of his brother's spotlight."
Harry scowled. So his mother was alive, too, assuming they were correct and he was indeed a relation of the other Potter to be sorted tonight. Instead, he focused on the emotionally easier part of that sentence to deal with for the moment.
"Muggleborn?" he repeated. "What's a muggleborn?"
"No one told you?" Gemma Farley asked. "Shouldn't Professor McGonagall have told you everything?"
"Why would she tell me anything?"
That led to Harry's growing ever more furious with the magical world. The Slytherins told him that it was usually the Deputy Headmaster—or Headmistress, in this case—to introduce wizards raised in the muggle world to everything magical, yet he had only received a letter he couldn't reply to until he visited Diagon Alley after pointing out to the Dursleys that it would get him out of the house for ten whole months of the year.
"Maybe they assumed the muggles would tell him," one Slytherin suggested.
Harry's scowl grew. "As if those disgusting people would tell me anything useful."
A few of the hateful stares around the room grew confused, which Harry didn't understand.
"You don't like muggles?" Draco Malfoy asked, giving him far more interest than before.
"Certainly not the ones I've met," Harry answered truthfully. Although, considering there were far more people in the world than existed in Little Whinging, he couldn't safely say he hated all of them. His instincts told him not to mention that, though—not with the way the Slytherins were now looking at him with entirely different emotions than before, ranging from neutrality to a little respect.
"But that doesn't answer the question of how a Potter ends up here, in Slytherin," an older boy mentioned. "Potters have been sorted into Gryffindor for centuries."
"His grandmother was a Black, though," Draco Malfoy pointed out. "Perhaps he inherited more from the proper side of his family than Potters before him."
Harry didn't feel like mentioning that his cunning and resourcefulness was born out of necessity—out of self-preservation—and his ambition was to prove that he wasn't a freak, that he was something more that the Dursleys could never be. He wanted to learn as much magic as possible so he could make life hell for the Dursleys just as they had done to him for literally as long as he could remember.
He wanted to be powerful.
"Classes start early tomorrow," the seventh year prefect announced before Harry could be pestered further with questions he didn't have the answers too. "Get to bed, everyone. I get the feeling it's going to be a long day."
Harry followed the other boys into their dormitory area. They were first separated by year, then by name, each one of them getting their own bedroom.
A benefit to living in the dungeons, Harry supposed.
Inside the room with his name on it, Harry found a four-poster bed hung with velvet green drapes, a desk for him to do his homework on, a private bathroom, and his trunk at the foot of the bed. It was far more spacious than the bedroom he had back in Surrey, so Harry already felt more comfortable here than he ever had there.
Harry changed into his sleepwear gingerly, wincing every time his back stung. There were no other people on this planet that he hated as much as Vernon and Petunia Dursley.
Actually, Harry corrected as he climbed into his warm and comfortable bed, learning that his parents were not only alive, but spoiling his previously unheard of twin brother… well, he loathed them more than he did the muggles. He had grown up hearing all about how his drunken father and whore of a mother had gotten themselves killed in a car accident—the cause of the ghastly scar that stretched his torso—which left Harry with nowhere to go but the Dursleys, where he was treated like a slave every single moment of his life. The only respite he was given came from the times he could escape to the library, a place Dudley was terrified enter because it was a house of knowledge and learning, the pig-in-a-wig's greatest fear in life.
Harry rolled onto his back and almost immediately rolled back onto his side, hissing slightly at the shock that went up his spine from the contact. No matter how many times it happened, he always fell out of the habit of staying off his back while he slept.
"I'll show them," he whispered to himself.
He would prove to his parents that they had made a big mistake leaving him with the Dursleys. They would learn that he was smarter, stronger, and more powerful than his brother.
They would see that he was better.
In a different room in the castle, someone who could relate to what Harry was feeling was pondering the information he had learned on this day, nearly ten years since his soul had been stripped from his body and forced to flee into the wilderness, awaiting help from one of his devoted followers.
Help that never came. It was only by mere chance that Lord Voldemort was able to encounter a young man seeking knowledge and power whom he could persuade to assist him. Quirinus Quirrell made for an awful host body, but at least Lord Voldemort was able to temporarily take control at times so he could remember what it was like to move his fingers and use a wand.
It had been a surprise to learn that no one knew about the second Potter boy's existence when he knew for a fact that there had been two children in the cot when he had attacked the cottage nearly a decade prior. It was even more surprising to learn that the green-eyed one was the boy who was sorted into the noble House of Slytherin. The green-eyed boy was the one who Lord Voldemort had actually felt a semblance of guilt over killing. Just from the look in his eyes, Lord Voldemort could tell that Hardwin Potter would have made an excellent Death Eater—the intelligence and lack of crying was what had truly caught his attention while Evan bawled away, frustrating the Dark Lord.
He had always hated when the children at the orphanage cried, and so he had cast the Killing Curse into the hazel-eyed boy's face, except the curse had rebounded upon him.
Almost ten years had passed since that day and Lord Voldemort was clueless as to what could have happened for such an astronomical, one in a trillion event to occur. Whatever had followed the curse destroying his body was missing from his memory, as if he had fallen asleep. His earliest memory of waking up afterwards placed him already in Albania, far away from the location of his downfall.
But now he had his chance once more.
He was honestly a little impressed that the green-eyed one, Hardwin, had managed to survive the backlash of his curse exploding all those years ago. Any other wizard would have been vaporized by the sheer power he had put into it, yet Hardwin Potter had survived, just like his brother.
That thought just about made Lord Voldemort chuckle, but he restrained himself. Two Boys Who Lived, but for different reasons—one through the direct curse and the other through its backlash.
He had already given Quirinus, the coward of a man, instructions to guide Hardwin Potter to some of the more advanced texts in the Dark Arts—figuring that, if the boy had made it into Slytherin, he would have more of an open mind when it came to magic than any other House, aside from a few exceptions amongst the knowledge-seeking Ravenclaws.
If all went to plan, then Lord Voldemort would have a loyal protégée as devoted to him as dear Bellatrix, whom he was both pleased to see had escaped Azkaban, if annoyed that she had lied about her loyalties to do so. She was almost as cunning and intelligent as himself, and one of his more powerful followers. It frustrated Lord Voldemort that she had not sought him out to help her Lord return and continue their cause, but she did not know that the gift he had given her was a Horcrux.
For now, all he could do was be patient and retrieve the Philosopher's Stone. Once his body had been restored and he was no longer reliant on a simpleton such as Quirrell, that was when he could truly begin to change the magical world in his image.
But until that day, he would manipulate Hardwin Potter into becoming one of his greatest followers, the leader of the next generation and second only to him, Lord Voldemort. After all, why worry about a threat vanquishing him when he could simply bring that threat to his side and turn him against those who would seek to use him as a beacon of light rather than a harbinger of darkness.