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The Orchard of Shattered Dreams

Summary:

Voldemort chooses to take over the Wizarding World instead of going after a stupid half-prophecy. In this new world ruled by a shadowy Dark Lord, Muggleborn Lily Evans raises her son alone.

Harry Evans grows up in the Muggle World, and goes to Hogwarts.
Severus Snape has to admit that the child is less James and more Lily.
Or is he?

Notes:

I will update the tags with each chapter.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Severus Snape scrambles into the Hogwarts Headmaster’s office. He’s trembling like a leaf and the old Headmaster takes pity on him.

“He means them, Dumbledore! Her son- he’s going to get her son.” Snape is a wreck, heaving gasps of anguish. When the Headmaster calms the man down enough to realize Snape has relayed the half-prophecy to Voldemort, he sends a Patronus to James Potter asking the man to prepare for going into hiding.

Satisfied, he turns to the wretched man on the ground, and with a few honeyed barbs, Snape is sufficiently broken. From there on, it is only too easy to set the young man on a path of redemption, gaining himself a loyal spy in the process.

And so, Albus Dumbledore prepares himself for the climax of the war- an attack on either the Potters or the Longbottoms.

 

 

Miles away, in the ruins of an old castle in the countryside, the Dark Lord emerges from his pensieve and weighs his options- he can either go confront the infant destined to vanquish him (who knows what mysterious powers the child has?) or he can further the war effort when his carefully placed spies are this close to taking over the Ministry of Magic.

It’s an easy choice- he sticks to his original, carefully thought-out plan; once he has the Ministry, he can listen to the full prophecy (no doubt Snape has heard only bits and pieces, what with the abrupt way the sentence terminated...) and decide his next course of action. Rookwood is in perfect position to collect whatever prophecy has been added to the Department of Mysteries- Malfoy and Crouch are confident in their clawed grip on the two biggest departments of the Ministry, and Bellatrix has been successfully training the newest recruits as a fall-back plan if the diplomatic take-over does not prove successful.

Lord Voldemort calls for Pettigrew and Fawley. They kneel at the foot of his throne, and the Dark Lord orders them to keep a scrutinizing eye on their charges and report back every single detail each month. Fawley is assigned to the Longbottom boy, and Pettigrew will watch the Potter boy.

The Wizarding world will fall under his rule very soon.

.......................................

 

And so, it does. The Ministry takeover is slow and hidden under layers of normalcy. Key players are taken out with the barest hints of compulsions- a retirement here and there, an accident in the Department of Mysteries that puts the Head Unspeakable out of commission, the Head Auror is killed in battle: noticeable, but spaced out evenly to avoid suspicion. And then, if there are a few bright minds in the Auror division who begins to sniff around- they are easily dealt with.

It takes three years, but Voldemort has succeeded in replacing key opposition in the Ministry, the newly-elected Minister of Magic is Cornelius Fudge, an incompetent nobody who succumbs easily to Malfoy’s Imperius. Malfoy himself would have been a good candidate Minister, but Dumbledore and his cronies suspect him to be in Voldemort’s service. And Lucius is disliked by far too many for his pure blood, wealth and power.

Just as well, the Wizengamot is firmly seduced to the Dark Side. The chief participants- those who dare to raise their voice in the large courtroom- are Marked, or sympathisers to the cause. The rest are imperiused, enough to get a majority to pass the bills that they would otherwise find undesirable. Nott and Parkinson are tasked with renewing the Imperius and slowly modifying the jurors’ memories. Soon, that process will also cease, when the Jurors have lost sufficient memories to become loyal to the Dark.

 

The Dark Lord smiles in his throne, savouring the taste of victory.

He faces his Inner Circle. Bellatrix sits on his left, while Lucius sits on his right. There is a hierarchy. Fawley and Macnair are relatively new faces in the assembly. The latter has served him devoutly, poisoning the Ministry from within. Fawley, while worthless, did him great service selling out the Longbottoms.

Longbottom and his wife were nuisance upstarts and blind followers of Dumbledore.

 

‘Were’; past tense.

Not anymore.

 

Voldemort grins savagely. The Longbottom residence was attacked by the three Lestranges and Rosier in mid-June two years ago. Voldemort himself led the attack, bringing down the place with Fiendfyre, and burning the Dark Mark onto the earth for Dumbledore to find. The young couple were then captured for the Lestranges to toy with, while he amusedly allowed Rosier to kill the child.

Unfortunately, the child survived- because the Order arrived with reinforcement and they had to apparate away. Dumbledore retrieved the child (who was relatively undamaged, save for a few curses from Evan) but the Longbottom couple could be towed to Voldemort’s headquarters. They were tortured to insanity (it revealed nothing new) and tossed out in Hogsmeade for the old Headmaster to find.

Fawley was rewarded for her efforts by a position in the Inner Circle, although it is a silent agreement between Voldemort and his Death Eaters that the greatest of their plans wo never be discussed in her presence.

Voldemort remembers that there is another choice for the Child of Prophesy: Harry Potter. He does not know where the boy is. Nor does he care- Dumbledore is convinced that Longbottom is the one. Voldemort is uninterested, he has secured his immortality. It will take years before that chubby babe can grow up to challenge him. But for now, he will keep an eye on the boy.

......................................

 

It’s the summer of 1991, and Harry Evans brushes the dirt off his clothes. He hates Cokeworth, with its smothering air and filthy streets, and equally dirty Muggle children.

He glares back at the boy who has just pushed him. It does not take much for Harry to make the child scream, curling up inwards and clawing at his eyes.

Harry can read minds. The boy’s is mundane, but Harry delves deeper, tearing at defences and unearthing painful memories. A snake in the woods pops out... the rotting flesh of a rat in the basement... getting backhanded by his drunk father... being chased by a pack of dogs...

“Stop it!” The boy begs. Harry bares his teeth vindictively, and pulls out of the boy’s mind. There’s a pocket-knife in the boy’s trousers, and Harry decides he likes it.

He leaves the boy sobbing and returns home.

 

Lily Potter sighs at the state her son is in. She hates it when he gets into fights. His knees are scraped, and she washes them before wrapping a clean piece of cloth around them. Harry smiles at his mother wryly and takes out his schoolbooks to do some summer assignments. She darns the holes on his trousers, and patches the blanket. It’s usually stiflingly hot in Cokeworth, but it can get very cold when it rains at night. They sit in silence for hours, until it’s time for dinner.

The Evans aren’t well-off. The house is long due for repair, and anything more than bread and the few vegetables in their backyard is a luxury. Lily can’t always find work- she’s never graduated school.

Muggle school, that is.

Lily is a brilliant witch, and she could have easily completed her Charms Mastery. Harry knows this. He knows there’s a world beyond the dull roads of Cokeworth, a world of Magic that he and his Mum belonged in.

When Lily’s back is turned, Harry grimaces at the pots and pans accumulating in the sink.

Scourgify could have cleaned them.

But Lily insists on washing them with hands. Insists on not doing magic unless it’s absolutely necessary. She keeps her magic books and reads them whenever there’s no work, and multiplies the food when they’re about to go hungry. Casts an Impervious charm on the leaking roof, but sends Harry up to manually fix the tiles.

She’s resentful. Harry knows this.

 

Divorce is a terrible scandal in the Wizarding World. You either live with your spouse forever, or you murder them. To make things worse, his mother’s a Muggleborn who married above her status, into a long line of wealthy purebloods.

........................................

 

Lily Evans regrets many of her choices.

 

Lily married James right out of school. Things were wonderful for a while, before the war began to take a toll on them. She tried her best to be a proper pureblood wife, respectful of their traditions even if she didn’t agree with all of them, and James didn’t mind- he was practically a rebel.

Mr and Mrs Potter weren’t very fond of her, though, and neither was Wizarding society, who mocked her from afar. And there were fights- when she and James did not agree on something. They were both fierce and unrelenting. They would both say cruel things to each other, and go off to cool their tempers at the nearest pub.

And then, Harry was born, just before the clock struck midnight to the First of August. Dumbledore told them of a prophecy, and the Potters went into hiding. In the following months, Lily broiled in unease, wondering how she would tell James that Harry wasn’t his.

 

The next Potter child comes into the world while his parents are still in hiding.

News about the Death Eater attack on the Longbottoms spread like wildfire. Members of the resistance begin to make contingency plans for their families. Lily finds Fleamont helping James draw up a will to split the inheritance between Harry and the newly-named Edwin.

She makes up her mind, and tells him.

James is betrayed. He cannot believe that Lily would cheat on him. She replies that she had not intended to. Fleamont Potter is enraged and disgusted, and calls her a Mudblood whore. It strikes her much more than the numerous times that insult has been used in school. Perhaps, it is because Fleamont has never hurled insults at people for their blood status. James is stricken, but he is not apologetic.

Lily packs her bags that night, and leaves with Harry. She apparates to her sister, and is coldly turned away. The next destination is her childhood home near Coketown. Petunia has sold it. Desperate, Lily trudges through the dirty streets until it rains, and she has to use an abandoned, broken-down house for shelter. She casts protective charms on the house, along with Muggle-Repelling charms and a magic-detecting ward.

The house becomes their home for the next ten years.

 

She often goes to the cemetery near Cokeworth Chapel. It’s where her parents are buried. They died in a car crash soon after Lily’s wedding, and the last time she visited their graves, she had been crying after a fight with James.

Seeing her distress, a young man came to comfort her. They left together to a pub nearby, and Lily told him about how her parents’ car had crashed onto an electric post, while swerving to avoid a drunk on the road. She told him about her fights with her husband, how his family thought low of her for her birth-status, how she was so tired- so very tired...

When she slumped dejectedly, the young man kissed her. It was drunken and fumbling, but she kissed back, just the same. They stumbled into a rented room and spent the night together.

 

Lily insists on staying in Coketown, if only to see Harry’s father once more. She does not remember much about him, except that he had been respectful, caring and gentle, and she could almost pretend he loved her. She does not even know his name.

She knows there are men like that, sweet with words and actions so that they may seduce any girl they come across. But somehow, Lily did not mind.

Even false respect was better than being called a ‘Mudblood whore.’

.......................................