Chapter 40. Welcome to Year 4! *spoilers*

[FullofSeoul]

Chapter 40 is up and running! Our Authorlord has returned!

Just a little thread announcing that the chapter is up, for those of you that don't check his main site or haven't gotten the notification yet.

I'm not exactly a mod, but feel free to use this thread for discussion about the new chapter! Here is the link to the actual chapter:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2636963/40 ... tures-Past

As always, thank you so much for all your hard work and dedication, Viridian!

[FlightlessFallen]

So... Predictions on the outcome of the cliffhanger? Since spoilers have already been warned for in the title, I'm just gonna put mine out there:

The killing curse misses Harry somehow (he dodges, or someone tackles Crouch or Percy slow motion dives in front of him to take the "bullet" for Harry or... Something). However it happens, the curse hits and kills Percy.

The after effects are game-changing. Few (if any) of his new family will blame him outright, but all of them grow increasingly distant, especially Ron and Ginny.

Ron is at a point where he is uncomfortable with his newfound fame. Given better circumstances, he would have grown to accept it and maybe even enjoy it, but at this point he still sees it as something entirely negative, and another thing to blame on having known Harry Potter.

Ginny, who in some part of her mind had seen Harry as a protector, someone who would never let something happen to his adopted family, loses that faith and begins to question everything about him, and about them again.

Harry feels guilty, that he deserves their silent, distant anger. He hates himself for not having seen Percy in a better light, and he can't help but feel that somehow, things would be different if he had truly included the older Weasley in the group's plans. He also feels that he has the blood of two innocents on his hands.

The only one with the clear head to see Harry as not at fault is Sirius, who, luckily enough, is exonerated for the Potters' murders following a ministry-wide scandal and large scale firings. When Sirius leaves the Burrow for 12 Grimmauld Place, Harry asks to come along, and with the only argument from the Weasleys being unconvincing "We don't blame you"s, the two depart.

Year four begins in a wildly different and completely unpredictable place, with Crouch Jr. out of the picture (but the question of fate still largely in play as the time of Voldemort's resurrection in the original timeline draws near) and his separation from his friends (equally due to his feelings of guilt and their own feelings of resentment coupled with the knowledge that it's not really his fault). Hogwarts is of course still a very dangerous place, and the timeline hasn't quite been changed enough that Harry's foreknowledge is useless. So essentially, he's got to keep his friends out of danger, despite none of them really wanting to talk to him and vice versa.

Eventually, even though things are different, the Six start working together in earnest again, and start associating more closely with the twins (who have become a little more serious with their brother's death) to become the Eight.

(baseless speculation, I know, but I took an idea and ran with it for a while for fun, and I'd totally be interested in seeing anyone else do the same)

[Wilken]

I have read it, and it is glorious, can't wait to read what happens next!

[JamestheFox]

AAAHHHH CLIFFHANGER NO WHY YOU MONSTER WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS

Spoiler: show

But yeah. A Killing Curse thrown in Harry's direction, in such close corners, with everyone Harry knows and loves nearby, is most likely not gonna turn out well.

I see a few possibilities here:

1: Harry gets AKed point-blank. Not sure how that will work out. Harry might die (what a tweest!), or Harry loses one of his two cores (and future memories?), or Harry somehow no-sells it?
2: Someone behind Harry gets AKed. This would be devastating. Ginny, Ron, Hermione, The Twins... so many horrible options.
3: The AK somehow gets deflected away from its target, hits someone of political importance.
4: Dobby somehow teleports in and takes the hit.

Beyond that, Harry's issues with the Animagus situation are welcome to see. Good ways to show that Harry isn't perfect just cause he's from the future.

EDIT: Also... is that Peter Pettigrew? Huh.

[firesoul01]

Spoiler: show

I'm pretty sure the blonde young man is supposed to be Malfoy. Or Barty Crouch Jr. I really really doubt it's Peter since he's described as a very young man. And my guess is that Harry will "die" and it'll fuse his magical cores.

[FullofSeoul]

I'm almost positive that the "pale young man" is Barty Crouch Jr. It's how he was described in the book. Plus, that particular scene was in this Eric Buehler's POV. Malfoy would probably be a boy, not a man.

I was actually looking through the reviews on Fanfic.net to see everyone's reaction to the cliffhanger and the general explosion over Viridian's return and I found a hilarious theory.

What if the wand that Crouch is using is one of Gred's and Forge's joke wands? As in, he shouts the curse and the wand promptly turns into a rubber chicken

[PhoenixFire]

I was very much so surprised when I saw the Nightmares of Future's Past in my favorite list on the top, I'd checked the blog a couple of weeks earlier and saw it sitting at 5.5k words or so

As for what I think might happen next:

Spoiler: show

Considering all we know of wandlore and how wands may change/decide who they are owned by, I think that since Harry was planning on letting Crouch Jr. take his wand, (assuming that is who it is, though I cannot see Pettigrew or Malfoy Jr being the person (since Pettigrew is Balding and Malfoy has white blonde hair and this guy has Yellow hair) the wand won't see that as it's owner being beaten in a fight and thus will not have changed allegiance,thus somethign similar as to what happened at the end of book 7. (Though I can't for the life of me remember if the Authorlord has said anything about the scar being a Horcrux in this story or if it was 'just' a connection.

[DIT_grue]

What if the wand that Crouch is using is one of Gred's and Forge's joke wands? As in, he shouts the curse and the wand promptly turns into a rubber chicken

Huh, I'd come to the same conclusion - the Author's Note says "Yes, you could consider this a cliffhanger… but not when you think about it." and they'd planned on having Barty snitch 'Harry's wand' for their little trap, so they should have taken some precautions... and that would be the funniest way to handle it, both in-universe and out.

Though I can't for the life of me remember if the Authorlord has said anything about the scar being a Horcrux in this story or if it was 'just' a connection.

IIRC - and it's a fairly vague memory - he's said that any scar Horcrux was crushed by the soul-merger when Harry came back; this may or may not have been phrased in a hypothetical, "If it existed in this universe that's what happened to it." I don't even remember if it was an AN or a forum post.

[ameyaa8]

Spoiler: show

i think the pale boy uses harry's own wand on him causind the spell to backfire killing pale boy

[ameyaa8]

Spoiler: show

I think boy uses harry's own wand to kill him , the spell rebounds and boy dies

[PencilMonkey]

Any thoughts on Harry's troubles with the Animagus transformation? The description of how the Animagus transformation works in this chapter, emphasized that your Animagus form depends on your personality - but people can change over time. What if, say, the potential animal that you could turn into changes over time, and once you learn to perform the transformation, your form becomes "fixed", and it won't change any further, despite any changes in personality that occurs after that. (Or perhaps learning to become an Animagus freezes your own emotional development, somewhat, meaning that you'll never afterwards change your personality so much that you wouldn't be in synch with your Animagus form.)

Perhaps Harry's two partially merged cores belong to sufficiently different versions of himself, that they've got different Animagus forms, and his magic is straining in two directions at once. They wouldn't even have to be all that different; possibly, two different breeds of a dog or cat form - let's say his young self's Animagus form is a poodle and his older self's form is a chow-chow, for example - would be so different that it causes his pain when his magic is trying to transfigure him into two (slightly) different forms.

What if the wand that Crouch is using is one of Gred's and Forge's joke wands? As in, he shouts the curse and the wand promptly turns into a rubber chicken

Huh, I'd come to the same conclusion - the Author's Note says "Yes, you could consider this a cliffhanger… but not when you think about it." and they'd planned on having Barty snitch 'Harry's wand' for their little trap, so they should have taken some precautions... and that would be the funniest way to handle it, both in-universe and out.

Seems legit. Good thinking, everybody!

[DeviousLuxray]

I'm pretty sure that's Malfoy.

[PeachWookiee]

What about Winky taking the blast? Her orders were to keep her younger master out of trouble, right? And killing someone at the World Cup would be trouble.

[MantisFA]

I think the "rubber chicken wand" theory is most plausible. Harry knew Crouch Jr. was going to steal his wand out of his pocket, because it happened like that before; hence the warning charm. It would be quite out of character for merged!Harry to take the slightest avoidable risk of Crouch Jr. getting his hand on a working wand when most of the Weasleys are there, potentially in the line of fire. If Harry didn't have a wand in his coat pocket, though, Crouch might have found someone else's; obviously, the best way to ensure that doesn't happen would be to have a fake wand there for the taking, exactly where the Death Eater found Harry's wand the last time around.

Also, note the wording: "a hand slipped the wand out of his pocket," not "a hand slipped his wand out of his pocket." Could be chance, but I think that our Authorlord is clever and subtle enough to write it that way as a clue that the wand in Harry's pocket is not the brother wand of Lord Voldemort's that chose him at Ollivander's; that wand is in its usual place, strapped to Harry's wrist in its quick-release holster.

There's also another, less likely way the scene could turn out to have been written somewhat deceptively. It could have said this:

His eyes cleared and he snarled an incantation an instant before Eric's stupefy reached him: "Avada Kedavra!"

But instead it said this:

His eyes cleared and he snarled an incantation an instant before Eric's stupefy reached him.

"Avada Kedavra!"

Written that way, it's not necessarily Crouch Jr. who said "Avada Kedavra!" He could have snarled something else, at the same time as someone else cast the killing curse in a much louder voice, making this a case of the Bait-and-Switch Gunshot trope.

[MantisFA]

Slughorn schooling Pansy on what it really means to be Slytherin was amusing, though I suspect Pansy is probably too pridefully stupid to benefit much from his tutelage.

I suspect Harry's problem with the animagus transfiguration has to do with the mismatch between his almost-fourteen-year-old body and his thirty-year-old extra magical core. It also seems possible that the two versions of Harry have different natural animagus forms; young Harry would probably become a stag, like his father, but I think adult Harry would probably become something with fangs and claws, not antlers and hooves -- something fast and agile and ferocious, like a green-eyed, black-furred leopard.

The Death Eater march after the World Cup is potentially an opportunity to completely smash Lucius Malfoy's nasty little clique: stun them, unmask them, and have them shipped off to Azkaban. We'll just have to see if it happens at all after Harry carries out his plan to entrap Barty Crouch Jr.

Charlie can be a bit scary when he goes into "protective older brother" mode -- "No. Evidence." LOL! Althgouh why you'd need to tranfigure someone into beef before feeding them to a Hungarian Horntail I can't imagine; the Horntail could probably digest the evidence pretty thoroughly without any such transfiguration.

Good to see Harry's relations with Percy continue to improve; perhaps Percy will get a promotion after Mr. Crouch is exposed and disgraced for breaking his son out of Azkaban.

I look forward to seeing how the Gryffindor Six make use of all those Omnioculars Harry picked up as time goes on; those could be very handy once the war begins in earnest.

Looks like the "Heir of Gryffindor" business has made Ron more sensitive to Harry's feelings about his own unwanted fame; I liked the way he handled that conversation with the salesman.

Speaking of sensitivity, maybe hearing Winky's opinion of Dobby will make Hermione think twice before trying to established an activist organization on behalf of the house elves whose goals and methods the vast majority of the elves themselves would not agree with.

WHAT!? The last two words of the chapter are… ooooooh, you rotten @#$%^&*! Evil, EVIL Authorlord! Not that I'm actually worried about the cliffhanger; as I said above, I don't think Harry would be sloppy enough to let Crouch steal his real wand, and the twins recently invented those trick wands that turn into rubber chickens the first time you try to cast with them. Here's hoping Crouch Jr. has time to see that happen before Eric Buehler's stunning spell knocks him out.

[jgkitarel]

It's not going to go down well, that's for sure, though it won't be the protagonists getting harmed, well, not quite yet. The Authorlord doesn't believe in invincible Plot Armor, but if he's going to kill of a main character for real, he's likely to make it mean something, or at least have them go down for a reason. Like beating a bad guy at his own game and getting killed for it.

[viridian]

Speaking of sensitivity, maybe hearing Winky's opinion of Dobby will make Hermione think twice before trying to established an activist organization on behalf of the house elves whose goals and methods the vast majority of the elves themselves would not agree with.

It didn't do so in canon. At least this version gives Harry's words a little more weight, so we can hope...

[Psalm Of Fire]

MMMmmm, that progress on ch41. My body is not ready.

Had a friend from out of town that I haven't seen it a few years hang out. Told her NOFP was updating. She bouned up and down and was like "REALlY?"

[ZeroCool]

How I would have it resolve:

Spoiler: show

Assuming that the killing curse works by removing the soul from the body, and the curse hits, one of his souls is removed. But, because he has two souls, one remains in the body keeping the body alive. As seen in the first chapter, when there is a living body with a soul, and an identical loose soul in the area, the loose soul will attach to the living body. the remaining soul will have to invite the severed soul to rejoin the body and Harry will have to go through the process of merging the souls all over again.

[PencilMonkey]

Upon re-reading the story again-again-etc., there were a couple of quotes that stood out:

It was the last week in July, the first time Harry tried to ‘flood his body with magic’. Instead of the tingle his godfather described, he felt a searing pain in his chest and almost passed out before he could stop it. He let out a muffled groan that had Sirius by his side in an instant. The pain faded as soon as Harry released his focus, but it came back just as strongly when he tried again.

Sirius looked like someone had just cancelled his Christmas. To his credit, he continued working with the others while coaching Harry on trying to get past this latest stumbling block. When nothing else worked, Mrs. Weasley bundled him off to St. Mungos and Healer Stanhope. Harry was concerned enough to go without protest. He figured that Healer-Patient confidentiality aside, he wasn’t outside the law unless he actually succeeded and then failed to register.

The healer presented him with mixed news. On the one hand, his peculiar fused core was growing together and slowly stabilizing. On the other, he couldn’t explain why Harry was experiencing such excruciating pain. It was possible that he was simply supplying too much energy to the mix, but his attempts to hold some energy back didn’t seem to make a difference. The pain was just as excruciating as before.

Harry let out a heartfelt sigh. Even if the worst happened, all of his information wouldn’t necessarily be lost forever. The part of his dream about his core exploding was probably just his imagination going into paranoid overdrive. He’d never heard of such a thing happening before, but it did make for a very dramatic ending.

He’d think back, later, on the irony of such a thought.