The Fall of Magical Britain and the Subsequent Rise of the British Magical Empire

Harry James Potter

Excerpt

Despite popular opinion the dark lord is not afraid of Albus Dumbledore.

I can understand why the belief spread. There are various events from the dark lord's personal history, which I'm not going to describe here out of fear that he might remove my head if he found it in print, that could lead to an explanation but the evidence that people lean to the most lies in the 1970's during the height of his movement.

The dark lord never went after Dumbledore, never confronted him directly, would battle with his underlings in the Order of the Phoenix but was usually quick to retreat if Dumbledore himself showed up.

This quickly was labelled by the propaganda machine as fear, that the dark lord was afraid of Dumbledore in the way that he was no other witch or wizard.

Fear is a strong word though, it is not fear to be cautious, to pick your battles and know the strengths and weaknesses of your enemies. Acknowledgement of another's prowess isn't fear. It isn't fear to keep aces up your sleeves and wait for opportunity.

But nobody asks the dark lord or if they do they tend to not believe him.

It's comforting to believe that there is a savior for the light, a man that we can all look to and say "Thank Merlin, he will protect us." We are familiar with good versus evil, the light versus the dark, and when given the opportunity we will gravitate towards the ideas even when barely supported. We had a dark lord ergo we must have a light one as well.

It was there during Grindlewald's campaign, the evil dark German wizard versus the good light English Dumbledore, and it will be there again. What an enviable thing, isn't it? To somehow capture that label of 'the good'.

The trouble is that if you take a step back, if you step out of Britain only for a moment, and if you peer at it through a window it's difficult to see light or dark.

Dumbledore has murdered children.

Tell me, at the end of things, beyond measures like the greater good and means to ends how can one possibly justify such actions as being light?

In the end, after many years, I have decided that I have no choice but to believe in one of the dark lord's more controversial statements.

There is no good, there is no evil, there is only power.

Prague 1992

News from England was sometimes slow in coming to the continent.

Harry had already found a job at an apothecary as a clerk by the time he'd heard anything about Harry Potter's fate.

He and Voldemort had discovered, much to Voldemort's irritation, that Europe didn't really care about England.

Wizarding Britain was viewed more as a rabid dog than a country. Something that should probably be put down, be kept away from the children, but mostly as something no one wanted to touch.

After a bit of thought Voldemort pinned it down to Grindlewald's sweep through Europe, "The states in the continent were devastated by Grindlewald's campaign, he obliterated at least a third of the population, killing off blood traitors and mudbloods alike. Now blood purism is a bit taboo which is beyond idiocy as that wasn't the point of the damned thing. Grindlewald never reached England though so we have no such inhibitions."

Harry wasn't sure Voldemort was completely right but Harry hadn't been willing to argue not having been there himself. Either way people in Czechoslovakia didn't think about England and English problems nearly as much as either one of them had expected. People knew of Harry Potter, knew his name, and there was some curiosity about him but no one would recognize him on the street or even in a photograph.

Harry felt this really put things into perspective, Voldemort just felt a little insulted, as if he should have spread his wings farther and faster so that everyone knew and feared his name. It was hard for him to imagine a world where he hadn't succeeded more so to see a world where no one even cared.

Either way it was towards the end of July, only a few days before his thirteenth birthday, that he found out exactly what Dumbledore had decided to do about Harry James Potter. He had been shelving the books in the store. There weren't many, it was an apothecary and not a book store, but there were a few that the old potions mistress liked to keep on display to sell at an exuberant price.

She was in the back office brewing the various orders that had come in, she was very different from Snape, not necessarily friendly but mostly indifferent to his presence. When he had first shown up asking for work she'd taken a few looks at him, had tilted his head and inspected his eyes behind his glasses, and had said he was good enough if he picked up German fast.

She paid him enough to live on and only appeared a few times a day to mutter at him in German, which he sometimes understood and mostly didn't, and then sigh and repeat herself in English.

He supposed it was fine but it was also kind of lonely, like it was still just he and the younger Voldemort, and like nothing had really changed.

"Money is money, for Merlin's sake Harry not everyone has to like you." Voldemort snapped, every second not spent on the stone was an irritation to him like it was time wasted.

There was also something he hated about the need to be liked, not that Harry was going to call it a need but it would be nice all the same if he had someone to talk to. Maybe it was because Voldemort seemed to have been there and done that, before going into the diary, Harry could never catch all the details but there had definitely been a time when Voldemort was very charming to those around him even when he hated all of them.

"It was a means to an end." He would always shortly respond whenever those thoughts drifted into Harry's head.

He placed an aged Potion textbook, one on experimentation with aquatic magical herbs, on the shelf and marked the price he had been told on the binding in clear magical writing that would fade with purchase.

She did appreciate how handy he was with magic, at the very least.

It was around then that the shop bell rang and a customer walked in.

"Gutten morgen." Harry beamed down at the man and stepped down from the ladder and then began asking how he might help.

Harry's German wasn't necessarily good but it was passable and after working in the shop it had improved immensely. It was enough to get the ingredients the man requested and to tell him when the potion he had ordered would be finished and reassure him that the Czech ministry was well aware of how long these things took to brew.

It was even enough for small talk at the register but it wasn't enough for the name Harry Potter echoing like a gunshot through the room.

"Ach was?" He asked and the man repeated himself Harry having to interrupt half-way through, "Englisch, auf Englisch, sie bitte."

"Oh, sorry," The man said giving him a polite smile before repeating himself, "The newspaper says that English boy, the boy who lived, Harry Potter has gone missing."

"Missing?" Harry asked because he had expected dead or fugitive or something, not up in the air like missing.

"Oh, that is very clever." Voldemort commented in Harry's head and for a moment it was as if Harry's head was on fire and his scar began to simmer in pain. Harry resisted the urge to rub the pain away and instead focused on the man as he continued to talk.

"Ja, the Hogwarts Defense professor is suspected of having kidnapped him as he is missing as well. The English keep him out of sight for ten years, not even knowing where he is, and then in a year manage to lose him. A boy who killed a dark lord, how do you lose such a thing? It would never happen in this country."

The sad thing was, from what Harry had seen of Prague, that was probably true. Had Harry been German, instead of English, he probably would have been sent to Durmstang. He would have lived with magical people, people who didn't call him a freak and lock him in cupboards, and he probably wouldn't have been killed by his own headmaster.

Things like that didn't seem to happen in Prague.

"Well, you know the English." Harry commented with a bitter smile, his head still reeling from the words. The man gave him an odd look, Harry after all clearly was English, but then shrugged figuring that since Harry was working at a shop in Prague he clearly wasn't that English.

And he wasn't, not anymore.

When the man left with his purchases, after Harry watched him leave and enter back into the magical district, he and Tom talked about what it all meant.

"Why would he say I was missing, instead of dead or worse?" Harry asked and he almost felt the younger Voldemort sneering at him for not understanding right away.

"If he claims you were dead it would be devastating for the nation. There would be riots, Hogwarts would come under quite a bit of scrutiny perhaps even be shut down. Not to mention there would be the slight problem if you were found and were not dead as he no doubt knows you are. However labeling an eleven year old as a fugitive, as being the dark lord incarnate, would be equally disastrous as well as completely ridiculous. Perhaps a few conspiracy theorists might pick it up, you might see it headlining in the Quibbler, but no reasonable sane wizard would look at the boy who lived and see me." Voldemort summarized sounding more like a standard text book than a person, as if this was all elementary, something Harry should have mastered ages ago.

"But why missing?"

"Easy, if you're missing people will look for you and when they find you they will shout it from the roof tops. Now Dumbledore has a search party of thousands, and if one of them finds you they'll deliver you straight to him. With a few minor exceptions of course."

That night he started packing everything up and leaving, getting out while the going was good, because it seemed as if every time he turned around the headmaster was there in his shadow.

Wasn't it funny how Albus Dumbledore never terrified him before he died? Well, he supposed it was understandable because death was so far away when you weren't actually dying. But Voldemort had always been wary of Dumbledore, not quite afraid, but definitely not willing to confront him head on especially with Harry as the mediator; shouldn't that have been enough of a sign? He'd been wary of Dumbledore, he hadn't trusted him, but he hadn't been afraid either.

It said a lot that Voldemort was the voice of reason that night, "Calm down, if we leave now that will get us nowhere."

"We could go further east; you said we might have to get into China somehow, maybe to muggle Hong Kong…" Harry rambled packing up the few belongings they had as he tried to picture the globe in his head and where was very far away from headmasters and being buried alive.

"We are not leaving! This is the act of a desperate man, people have been asking where you are and he's run out of time to stall, this means he has already looked and already failed to find you."

Harry hands paused for a moment but he continued to pack. Dumbledore, with Voldemort temporarily out of commission, was the most powerful wizard Harry knew of. Voldemort could resent that fact all he wanted but the older more experienced version of himself was dead and this one didn't even have a body.

As they'd found out last time Harry Potter really wasn't a match for Dumbledore.

"I need more time." This time Harry really did stop, stunned by the admission, "I can't sit down and think like I need to if we're moving across the continent. I need more time here."

Harry sighed and sat on the floor, looking out the window to the street lamps and crescent moon, it was a clear warm night the kind of night that wrapped around you like a blanket. If he looked closely into the glass he could see his own reflection, still pale, still small, and still very thin but all the same he looked very different than he had only a year before.

"Are we even close?" Harry asked.

There was a pause as Voldemort considered it, considered how to best phrase his response, and then, "Closer than we were."

"Alright, we'll stay."

After that Harry made sure to read the papers daily, his head always aching after trying to make it through the German text, and most of it were on Czech affairs or those of nearby countries but sometimes there were updates on wizarding Britain.

He got his eyes fixed, to get rid of the trademark glasses, and it was so odd waking up in the morning with everything clear and bright instead of blurred. He didn't change anything else in case the potion's mistress or the customers noticed and started asking questions but the glasses seemed to be enough.

Voldemort explained it after a few days when no one had seemed to spot him.

"You've noticed this before but people see what they wish to see. They expect to find the boy who lived being tortured by a kidnapper, they expect to see the scar right away, they expect the glasses, but most importantly they don't expect him to be a poor foreign school boy working in a shop. People aren't looking for you here."

Either way there was nothing like that first day in Diagon Alley where everyone was pointing and staring and asking if they could please shake his hand. People went on with their business, asked for their potions, and left Harry alone.

So they kept a wary eye on the papers, listened in the streets for English accents, and continued to work incessantly on the solution to Voldemort's body problem.

They moved onto elixirs and potions, Harry really wished they had stayed in the realm of Transfiguration.

Transfiguration didn't demand test subjects.

They were in the flat when Voldemort first brought it up, he'd probably had the idea for days, but he'd waited until Harry had almost relaxed; almost stopped looking over his shoulder for Voldemort, until the nightmares were just about being buried alive instead of being murdered. He'd waited until he felt Harry had it in him to be reasonable, as if this was something you could be reasonable about, and then when they were alone he'd started talking.

Harry was horrified.

"Believe me, Harry, if I could use you as a guinea pig I would have already; unfortunately I happen to live inside your head so I need that to remain intact." Voldemort noted in a tone that was more amused than frustrated, an odd occurance given his foul mood recently, as if Harry's panic was something to be laughed.

Sure, Voldemort hadn't exactly been overly enthused about the idea either, he didn't like the idea of grotesquely mutated things any more than Harry did but Voldemort was also practical to the point of monstrosity. The older Voldemort wouldn't have even blinked, the younger Voldemort thought about it and decided it was for the best.

Means to ends, everything was means to ends with Voldemort.

"I'm not going to do it!" Harry protested, feeling as if it would do nothing at all but meaning it all the same, because he wasn't going to do it.

He'd do a lot of things for Voldemort, he'd done many things for Voldemort, but Voldemort had never asked him to kill anyone before and Harry wasn't about to start.

"It's not murder."

But it was murder, murder if it went wrong, that was the whole point! Using someone else in case it went wrong because it probably would because it usually did go wrong! It was so easy to picture too, that's what was terrifying, he'd seen it before after all. He'd seen Quirrell's limp body hanging in Dumbledore's grasp and then that flash of green light before his own eyes, he knew what murder looked like.

"It is not the same."

Funny, Harry thought to himself, because he was sure Dumbledore probably had the exact same justification for doing what he had. For the greater good, he'd probably said to himself right before he offed Quirrell and then offed Harry.

"It is not the same and you know it!"

They both stopped for a moment, listening to those words echo in his head. And both thought, almost at the same time, that the older Voldemort probably wouldn't have even bothered with the justification. He would have just done it.

Harry knew why Voldemort was pushing for it, and if he calmed down to think about it, why he felt like he could. If you looked around there really were some worthless people hanging about, people nobody would miss, and wasn't it better that the world have Voldemort who actually had things to do and accomplish than it was to have them?

The Dursleys were always the first to come to mind with this thought. Harry hadn't been about to throw them in Azkaban, mostly not to allow other muggles to be thrown in there, but all the same if he had to trade them for someone else. If he had to trade their lives for the only friend he had…

In the end Voldemort had one final argument.

"If you don't do it then Dumbledore will come, he will find you, and he will kill you just like he did before; and maybe this time you won't get back up."

The next morning Harry had started working on the elixir as per Voldemort's careful instructions. He watched as the thick red liquid bubbled, and he couldn't help but wonder even while he watched, what exactly it would taste like as it ran down his throat.

When it was done he placed it into various vials, labeling them carefully, and stored them away for safe keeping.

And there they would remain, until later, when he would manage to find a suitable test subject.

Author's Note: Behold, I am alive! At any rate it's nice to see a lot of interest in this story, there's always that element of the unknown particularly if you're picking up another author's work. I feel I should warn you though that this story isn't high on my priority list, it will be updated, but not as often as some other things I work on. So, sit tight.

Thanks to readers and reviewers you guys are the best and reviews are much appreciated if you wish to leave some.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.