Chapter Text
The Dark Lord Voldemort killed James Potter without hesitation. He climbed the stairs, an uncommon breeze blowing through his hair, a freezing gust before the magical mist blew the door to the nursery open for him. Lily Potter stood in front of the white-painted cradle with her wand pointed at him, her arm firm and unwavering as she stared him down.
“Step aside,” he said for the sake of Hadrian Black, his Death Master. For a cold blooded necromancer that could eat souls and kill people with a single touch, the boy had a soft heart, even in his life of undeath. It was exactly a year since the man had achieved lichdom, and ensured Voldemort’s own immortality in the process. Hadrian had a very soft spot for Lily Potter, who offered him kindness along with Alice Longbottom when his traitorous cousin took him to meet the Order of the Phoenix. If only little Regulus was alive to watch the last of their members fall to his enemy’s wand.
“No,” she said. “Spare him. Take me instead.” The Dark Lord didn’t respond. He didn’t even entertain the idea, but his silence must have given her the illusion of such. “He’s just a baby.”
“Stand aside, or I will kill you,” he repeated, and the wench refused to take his most benevolent offer. On the third attempt to get her to move, he was done with her nonsense and killed her. Nearly as soon as she had hit the ground, the Dark Lord looked at the baby with the same green eyes as Lily Potter.
“You would have been perfect,” he said with a sneer, refusing to admit his jealousy over having such a perfect child. He looked just like his Hadrian. It could have easily been their offspring if either of them were capable of producing one. He sighed and sent a killing curse forward, and the breeze circled the room, tearing everything apart almost as if it were angry, before the green spell struck little Harry Potter in the chest. The Dark Lord saw the silvery sheen of a soul enter the boy nearly exactly as the spell struck, and just before the Dark Lord’s body was ripped apart, he saw a new pair of green eyes looking at him, a pair of green eyes that he knew very well, and the baby was surrounded by black feathers as the magnificent guardian crow, Kiki, rose around him with her spear. The Dark Lord’s body was destroyed, and his wand hit the wooden floor, rolling down the stairs and into the hands of a rat man, Peter Pettigrew, who barely apparated away before one Sirius Black came running at him, spells flinging out of his wand. Harry Potter had survived by some sheer miracle, or so the world thought.
***
Albus Dumbledore approached Godric’s Hollow with a frown and glistening blue eyes. Lily and James Potter were too young to have died in such a way, they were too young and they had a baby to care for. Their family was ruined. He knew Tom had become quite a monster, but to personally orphan a child in such a way? It was truly despicable. He saw the end of an Auror robe disappear with apparation and knew that Sirius Black had been there. The old man shook his head as he walked into the building and saw James’ corpse first, and as he somberly walked up the steps, he saw Lily from outside the door frame. Little Harry Potter was wailing, his little hands poking out of the bars of his crib. Arms that were marked with black tattoos that Albus was very sure he hadn’t had when he first met the infant only months earlier during the casting of the fidelius charm.
“Oh Hadrian,” Albus said, picking up the baby that stopped crying to look at him. Those eyes. Albus would recognize those eyes everywhere. “What have you done?” In the crib were black feathers that Albus remembered belonged to a maleficium- wielding necromancer’s soul forged servant. The baby’s hands grabbed out to him, and Albus held the baby to his chest and the infant, far too little to understand much, hugged him back. It was pathetic and horribly sad that a man like Hadrian -- no, a boy like Hadrian -- had been reduced to inhabiting a body of Harry Potter. Albus set the boy on the floor and cast a charm to see if the body was even alive, and he found that it was not . Harry James Potter was dead, but his body was being used.
Hadrian Black was a mistreated young man with a life where he was constantly forced into demonstrating his dangerous abilities and praised for doing so. He was raised by pureblood fanatics. That’s why Albus decided that it would be best if Hadrian had a chance to see the lives of the muggles he was taught to hate so fervently. Hadrian was not like the other Death Eaters, because he wasn’t a Death Eater, and he had been very friendly with the Order of the Phoenix in his own special way. He had endeared Albus and the rest of them to him, and even Albus couldn’t deny him because the boy was dreadfully awkward. There was no dishonesty in his portrayal of himself, there was only shyness that belied the truth of a scared boy who wanted to be loved. He hoped that if he put him with Lily’s family, who knew no better, he would finally get what he so desperately needed. Hadrian had loved Lily, he had spent hours researching spells with her and creating arithmetic sequences by her side, so surely if he would have been her child, which he had admitted he wished for on a few occasions, he would have wanted to know her family.
Albus decided on what he had to do, and gave Harry to Hagrid for safe keeping, pleased that the large man didn’t seem to notice Harry’s true identity. From then on, Hadrian Black was Harry Potter, and there was no reason to think of him as anything else, because he would be raised as Harry Potter would have been, and he would learn and grow just like the boy.
That night he asked Minerva to watch the Dursley, Lily’s sister Petunia’s, family’s house, from sunup to sun down. The next night, on November first, he set Harry Potter, swaddled in a small blanket to keep his rather telling tattoos from Minerva who would similarly recognize them, on the doorstep with a letter telling Petunia a slightly modified version of events of the previous night and the necessity of her raising her nephew in the absence of his parents. He mentioned that strange things may happen, but that he would remain harmless but shouldn’t be praised for any scary outbursts (his attempt to keep the necromantic abilities from being praised as they had been in his previous life). He hoped it was enough to tame the savage beast, but when Regulus had brought his cousin along, Albus saw the gentleness in him when he interacted with his creatures and the Weasleys, and he saw the hope and friendliness in his companionship with Lily, so his original claim that he was inhumanly evil was incorrect. Hadrian, or rather Harry now, just needed to be properly taught to express himself in a safe and healthy way where his deadly and dangerous abilities were not the center of his self worth but the goodness in him. Hopefully, if anyone could do that, it was a muggle family.