A Change in History: The Philosopher's Stone
A HP Fanfiction
Disclaimer: I do not own HP.
Chapter One: The Letter
"HOGWARTS SCHOOL
of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY
Headmaster: ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock,
Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards)
Dear Mr. Morgan,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted
at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please
find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.
Term begins on September 1. We await your owl by no
later than July 31.
Yours sincerely,"
Harry scanned the elegantly penned lines of the signature and folded up the missive with a sort of detached finality. He stared down at the thick sheaf of parchment crumpled in his fist even as Draco whooped disgracefully and waved his own letter high in the air, forgetting all about the breakfast set out before him on the dining table. Narcissa looked up from her own plate and scowled lightly at him with a fleeting disapproval.
"Draco, please don't. It's undignified." Draco ignored her, choosing instead to rest his elbows—something Narcissa turned her nose up and huffed in indignation at—and lean forward in his seat, catching Harry's eye.
"Do you know what this means? We're officially in! Of course, there was no doubt of it, but it is a lot different being told you're going to go and actually holding the proof in your own hands, eh?" Harry snapped out of his hazy trance and spared his friend a smile.
"Sure is. I wonder what House I'll be in." Draco snorted and brandished his right hand, which still held his Hogwarts letter, dismissively in the air. It came perilously close to the flaming candles of low hanging chandelier above the table and Narcissa snapped at him, her patience at an end. Draco forced back a frown and sank back into his chair.
"Slytherin, of course. What other House could you possibly go to? You're the Heir, for Merlin's sake—" ("Draco, don't swear!") "and that's the House I'll be in, and I'm dead certain that Theo and Blaise will be there, too." Harry shook his head at his friend's righteously confident expression and poked at the egg on the plate in front of him.
"I don't know. Ravenclaw sounds sort of nice." Harry replied evasively, knowing how the blond would react.
"Ravenclaw? Please, Harry, why would you want to go there? Nothing but a bunch of single-minded bookworms. Of course," he added almost as an afterthought, "Ravenclaw is far better than Hufflepuff or" he shuddered theatrically "Gryffindor." He fairly spat the word, crinkling his pointed nose in disgust as if he had just uttered an appalling swear word. "Believe me Harry," he finished surely, polishing off the last remnants of bacon that remained on his plate, "Slytherin is the way to go."
Harry, who had been prodding the egg on his plate with half-hearted enthusiasm, jabbed it a bit too hard with the sharp end of his fork. The egg split open and the gooey, yellow yoke spilled from its fragile cage and seeped to the far corners of his plate, soaking the few scraps of toast and hash browns that still remained. Harry scowled and pushed the offending mess away, rising from his chair and following Draco as he strolled casually from the room. Narcissa had left the table without a word during their mostly one-sided exchange of words, and for it Harry was secretly glad: as much as Harry liked the Malfoys Draco's mother could get viciously unpleasant if she wished to and Harry had enough to deal with without a rare showing of her temper.
"No."
"Oh come on, Harry, it's not going to kill you."
"I beg to differ."
Theo groaned in annoyance at his friend's stubbornness. "Look, its just hair dye. We need to change your image before we go to Hogwarts. Just do it for us at least, alright?" he added, catching the stony and unyielding expression on Harry's visage with little difficulty. "We won't do much. Just add a touch of color, won't we, Draco?" Draco blinked and the evil grin that had been on his face since the beginning of the argument disappeared. The boy nodded solemnly.
"Of course," he said with perfect innocence, though Harry detected a darkly amused smirk tugging at the edges of his mouth. "After all, you know more curses than the rest of us combined. Ruining your hair would be suicide."
Harry's lips, if possible, thinned even further and his eyes hardened into blocks of ice. "Forget it," he gritted out. "You're not getting near me with that thing."
Theo sighed and gave the bottle of hair dye in his hand a dramatic shake. "Dear me, dear me, whatever are we to do?" He lamented with such a staged tone of voice that Harry immediately knew he was plotting. His eyes narrowed in on the offending container. Theo grinned and gave the bottle another strong shake to ensure he had all of Harry's attention. "I suppose we could just drop it…But then again," the grin on his face was touched with a heavy dose of playful malice, "Mrs. Malfoy has been just aching to do something about that tail you call hair. Why, I heard her talking this morning about cutting it off…"
Harry was horrified and it showed. "She wouldn't," he whispered, stricken with uneasiness. "You're lying."
Draco gave him a serpentine smile as Theo snickered quietly. "Am I?" he taunted, toying with the cap of the bottle. "You may never know. The question here is my dear friend, are you willing to take that risk? If you don't want her to make it so that your hair's short again, I'd suggest we strike a bargain: We—as in Draco and I—will convince her not to go through with it. That is, of course, implying that you agree to our terms of contract. Are we?"
Harry glared at him with all the venom in his system. "You two go way past evil," he muttered, eyeing the container held in Theo's hand, "I don't even know what you are. It goes beyond my vocabulary."
Theo's grin grew wider. "Is that agreement I hear in your voice?" Harry grunted, struggling with himself before nodding grudgingly. Draco stepped forward from his place over Theo's shoulder and led him over to the nearest door, which was the entrance to Harry's bathroom. As he exited the room at Draco's stern guidance Harry glanced desperately behind him at Blaise who was sitting in an armchair, watching the events unfold with exasperated amusement. Blaise had said not a word in Harry's defense, and as his slanted eyes met the raven haired boy's he shook his head, a smile tugging at his lips. Harry glared at him and mouthed 'Traitor!' before Theo gave him an impatient push to the back. Harry stumbled into the bathroom swearing lowly under his breath, and Theo clucked his tongue in disapproval.
"If we're going to do this we need complete compliance." He closed and locked the door behind him with a click. The sound it made seemed deafening to Harry's ears in the oppressive silence of the closed in chamber, bouncing off the sleek linoleum underneath his feet. Harry gulped as a hand grabbed his shoulder and as he felt himself being tugged towards the sink in the corner Harry believed he had never met two people as grossly manipulative as these two, save his father.
"There, all done. See, that didn't kill you, now did it?"
Harry heard a hum of smug approval from his right, and Draco reached over and tapped Harry's forehead.
"You can open your eyes now, Harry. It's over." Harry's eyelids remained firmly shut.
"I'd rather not look thanks. I'm afraid I'll go mad if I see what you've done with my hair." A sigh echoed through the hollowed room from behind him and from the sound of it Theo had moved to the back of his chair.
Probably to escape whatever reaction I'll have to their torture, Harry thought sarcastically. The boy felt a pair of fingers rap more persistently on his brow and he reached up his own hand and swatted them away.
"You'll have to look sometime, Harry. You can't go around with your eyes closed forever. You'd be banging off walls for the rest of your life." Amusement fairly oozed from Draco's voice and Harry scowled lightly.
Do I have to?" Harry felt an arm link itself underneath his own arms and haul him with much effort to his feet. Harry didn't resist, for he knew they could do nothing to him that they hadn't done already.
"Yes you have to."
"Think of it this way Harry," Draco said from his right. "The sooner you look, the sooner you can get it over with."
Harry mulled over this. "I suppose…" he started dubiously. Twin hands clapped onto both his shoulders and he felt himself being turned on the spot.
"Jolly good." Theo replied genially. "Now open your eyes. I want to see your reaction!" Harry very nearly refused to do so altogether simply from the tone of the boy's voice, but instead he sighed and opened his eyes, watching for a split second as their emerald green reflected back at him from the mirror over the sink that was before him. His jaw dropped in shock.
His hair was still the same length it had been, reaching about an inch past his shoulders, but there was something different about it. It was still black, he surmised as he tilted his head to the side in confusion. He jolted in astonishment and did it again, instead in the opposite direction as he noticed the change. His hair—previously an ebony color no matter what way you turned it—now seemed to shine with a very dark burgundy, so faint that you wouldn't have even noticed it was there if you hadn't known what it had looked like before the treatment. The same thing had been applied to his bangs, which he kept long so he could hide the annoyingly noticeable shade of his eyes when he went out into public. His jaw worked soundlessly in surprise and Theo whooped triumphantly behind him.
"Look at your face! Merlin, this is priceless." The boy exclaimed happily, bouncing up to stand next to the shocked Heir. "Isn't it wicked? I picked the color." He said proudly, puffing his chest out as he surveyed his handiwork. Draco snorted softly and paced towards them to stand on Harry's other side.
"You selected a vampire-like name Harry," Draco remarked slyly, a smirk spreading unchecked across his face. "I figured that this would do nicely to compliment that."
Harry was still frozen stock-still in shock, but slowly he began to really examine the change wrought in his appearance. Theo grinned smugly at Draco behind Harry's back.
"I told you he'd like it," Theo gloated. Draco spared him a withering glare.
"It was my idea, you dolt." Theo stuck his tongue out at him and beamed at Harry.
"See? I knew you'd like it. You do, don't you? I know you do. Why won't you admit it?"
"He's too stubborn and proud to admit it, but he likes it. It's fairly obvious," he pointed out indifferently with a shrug of his shoulders when Harry turned to glare at him. He didn't seem to be interested in his friend's reaction at all, but Harry knew better. The devilish glint in his eyes gave him away. Theo tapped on his back to get his attention and handed him a cord of leather. Harry nodded his thanks and tied his hair back, leaving his bangs to frame his face.
"There," Theo said, nodding. "Now it's finished. Looking sharp, Harry."
Harry cuffed him round the head with a roll of his eyes, but secretly he was pleased. He smiled slightly to himself in a mirror and followed the two out of the room, not paying any attention to Blaise's bemused response to his new look. He wondered vaguely what Nagini would think, but quickly pushed the thought away with a shiver. Nagini was going to go ballistic.
A/N: Hehe, this chapter was so much fun to write. - Next chapter, we go to Diagon Alley! Darn the stupid formatting for this site--they ruined the formatting for the Hogwarts letter that I had to fight with my computer to achieve! And it looks identical to the one from canon on my Word program, too...Grrr...
For those of you confused about Harry having his hair dyed, think of it this way: despite the growth and changes he's gone through since leaving the Potters, he still looks remarkably like James—something no one who knew what Harry looked like back then would miss. The color of his eyes gives him away as well (I hinted at that in this chapter) so Draco and Theo added "just a little color" to his hair to make the similarity less distinct. They can't do much to Harry's appearance for various reasons.
Magic can't be used. Spells can be cast to cancel that out, and that wouldn't be good for Harry. Magical accidents can also cancel out any glamour spells he may use.
Muggle ways can't be used, either. He'd have to continuously re-apply the hair dye and other things to keep up the appearance, and it is far too easy for Harry to forget once he gets caught up in the bustling school life at Hogwarts. Contacts to hide his eye color wouldn't work, either; sooner or later he would have to get the prescription changed (I know this because my mother used to have to use contacts) and that liquid thing they use to keep the contacts fresh (forget the name)? Harry would have to go get more eventually, and it wouldn't be wise to have the Malfoys buy it and send it to him. Malfoys buying Muggle products? I don't think so, even if they could get away with it. And if Harry's caught opening said package he'd have to explain why he had them. I mean, bad eyesight (which he doesn't have anymore) is one thing, but why would the color of the contacts be different from his actual eye color, which you can tell by the look of the contact itself? No, it would be too risky, so they have to make do with as little as possible so that they won't slip up. Basically what they did was give him very faint burgundy highlights, and even though it's a Gryffindor color, well…they couldn't very well use green, right? That would take explanations they can't afford to give and be pretty odd besides.
On another note, I thought it would be nice to put a bit of humor in this chapter. Although this is a Dark!Harry story, I felt that some of you could use the humor, especially after what happened in chapter thirteen of the previous installment (there, for those of you who haven't read the prequel to this story nothing is spoiled!). Besides, the idea came to me and I couldn't shake it off. I had to write it; it wouldn't let me do otherwise.
I do apologize for boring you on the last chapter of the last story, but describing Malfoy Manor was necessary. Quite a few major events happen here and at least having a reference for the general layout of the building will come in handy later.
Some of you have asked and yes, Harry does have a plan for Hogwarts. What it is, you ask? You'll have to read to find out, I'm afraid. :) He will be getting a wand next chapter when they go to Diagon Alley; he can't very well go parading around Hogwarts casting wandless magic left and right, ne?
For those of you "action junkies" who read this saga (and yes, it will be a saga) there will be action in this story. After all, with three-headed dogs, Quidditch and a possessed teacher, how can't there be?
Yes, for the moment Voldemort is dead. He will return, but for now he's MIA. However, he will make a few appearances before he's resurrected.
No, this won't be slash, sorry to disappoint everyone who wanted it. Other than Harry toying with a few females in the school for practical purposes (information gathering, for example) I don't plan on there being any relationships. I might change my mind later, but for now that's how it is. I apologize to those of you who wanted romance, but as I've told others—I'm not very good at writing romance.
There should be vampires in this; I'm not certain at this point whether or not it's worth the trouble, but I'm hoping I might be able to fit in a scene where Tom tries to garner their allegiance. The werewolf who turned Remus? I'm not sure. Unless I choose to have him play a viable role in the war most likely not. Though at the moment, now that mention it, a new plot twist is coming to mind…I'll have to see if I can work that in for you without slowing the plot down.
It's good to see people believe me when I say that Harry isn't going Light. Believe it or not in the beginning Lily and James were just going to neglect and ignore Harry instead of beating him, but I changed it. After all, only being neglectful still gives them a window of opportunity to be forgiven, and I didn't want them to have a snowball's chance in Hawaii to have such a reprieve. I'm sure you all agree with me. :)
Also—I've put this up in my profile, but in case some of you missed it—I have a forum created on dedicated solely to this saga, so you can check it out and talk to other people who read this story for fun if you have spare time. You'll find the link up by my penname (for those of you who don't know where it is) in my profile.
Anywho, next chapter should be up sometime next week, so look forward to it!