Harry stepped down the worn stone steps of Grimmauld Place, the transition from the stifling air of the house to the cold morning breeze feeling like a baptism. He paused on the sidewalk, stretching his arms toward the pale London sky, feeling the joints in his back pop with satisfying precision.
He could feel his body settling back into its peak condition, the lethargy that accompanied the dimensional jump had finally evaporated, replaced by the humming of power just behind his skin as his authorities sang for him to unleash them.
While he was stuck in this world waiting for his "internal clock" to reset for the next jump, he wanted to see the sights. He wasn't going to stay cooped up in a house that smelled of dust, old magic, and unresolved trauma. Grimmauld Place was a mausoleum of failures similar to his own before he decided to change it, and Harry had never been fond of graveyards.
He had barely taken three paces when the door behind him creaked open again.
"Wait up!" Hermione's voice called out.
Harry glanced back over his shoulder. Hermione was scurrying down the steps, her scarf trailing behind her like a frantic banner, with Tonks right on her heels. The Metamorphmagus was half-buttoned into a trench coat, her hair a soft, anxious shade of bubblegum blue that clashed violently with the grey London morning.
He raised a single, skeptical eyebrow, his gaze sweeping over them both with an amused intensity. "What's this? Are you two stalking me now? I thought I made it clear I was just going for a stroll."
Hermione flushed a deep crimson, looking sheepish as she caught up and smoothed her hair. "Well… the others thought it might be better if you didn't go wandering around alone. Your presence, your face, you stand out. And we don't know who might be watching the street. Death Eaters, Ministry spies, or worse."
He raised an amused eyebrow. Were they worried that a bunch of spinless fools would actually be able to hurt him? He nearly laughed, a hundred thousand of them could come, and they'd die.
"Plus, we can't exactly let a 'Godslayer' run around London without supervision, can we?" Tonks added with a cheeky, lopsided grin, falling into step on his left, okay now, he was insulted, but he made sure not to show it.
"You might accidentally overthrow a government or decide the Parliament building looks better as a pile of artistic rubble. Someone has to keep you from causing an international incident." Okay, he was a little less annoyed.
Harry chuckled, "A fair concern. I've been known to be a bit… transformative when I'm bored. If I decide the architecture is lacking, I tend to fix it with a fist." He gestured for them to join him, his stride lengthening. "Well then, come on. If you're coming, don't lag behind."
"So, where exactly are you heading?" Tonks asked, her eyes darting around the Muggle street with an Auror's ingrained suspicion, her hand hovering near her pocket where her wand was tucked.
"Diagon Alley," Harry replied, his gaze fixed forward. "I'm curious about the fundamental differences between our worlds. The best place to find the pulse of a society is its marketplace. I want to see what passes for magic here, how it works, if it's the same as my world. How do the spells act and so on."
"Well then, let's save some time and get out of the cold!" Tonks chirped, reaching out to grab his arm with professional familiarity. "I'll just apparate us to the Leaky Cauldron, and we can be there in a—"
"No."
The word was like a physical wall, absolute and unyielding. Harry pulled his arm back with a speed that shouldn't have been possible for a human, his eyes flashing a dangerous green that momentarily drowned out the morning sun.
The sudden sharpness in his voice made both women freeze in their tracks, their breath hitching as a pressure fell on them and disappeared just as fast.
Seeing the shock and flicker of fear on their faces, Harry let out a small, tired sigh and smoothed the lapels of his coat. "As I told you before, magic doesn't interact well with a Campione. My body is a walking rejection of the laws of sorcery. My existence is greater than mortal magic, for lack of a better term. While I can allow myself to be pulled through an Apparition, the 'tube' of space it uses tends to be affected by my very presence."
He paused, a memory flickering in his mind. "Back in my fifth year, I decided to experiment. I was curious about what would happen if I forced a spatial jump while my Authorities were active. Let's just say the space between the start and the end had not exactly been a fun ride."
"Fascinating," Hermione muttered, her fear already being overtaken by her academic hunger. She was practically vibrating with the need to take notes. "So, your body rejects all magic? That's amazing but also terrifying. If Apparition is off-limits, how do we get there? It's a long walk to Charing Cross Road."
Harry smiled, a knowing thing. He lifted his right arm, and they watched, mesmerized, as his nails grew longer and sharper, turning into claws that glowed with a brilliant, divine white light.
"This is how," Harry said. With a casual, almost lazy flick of his wrist, he slashed the air in front of them.
Screeeech!
The sound was like metal on silk. A jagged, bleeding rift tore open in the middle of the sidewalk where Harry and the girls stood.
"Wow…" Tonks breathed, her hair turning a vivid, electric yellow that signaled her utter amazement. "Amazing," Hermione whispered, walking a full circle around the rift, her hand hovering inches from the edge where the air felt cold and electric. "I can't feel a single sign of magic here."
"It's not magic," Harry said, gesturing for them to follow as he stepped into the void without a moment's hesitation. "It's one of my Authorities."
They emerged a heartbeat later, stepping out of a similar rift directly into the center of Diagon Alley, not far from Gringotts. The transition was seamless, lacking the nausea-inducing squeeze of Apparition or the jerk of a Portkey, both girls had grown used to.
"Authorities?" Tonks asked as they began to navigate the crowd. People instinctively parted for Harry. She noticed it was a subconscious reaction to the sheer, crushing presence he radiated. "What is that?"
Harry decided to explain, his eyes scanning the shopfronts with clinical interest. "When a Campione kills a God, we usurp a portion of their essence. We take their domain, their laws, their divinity, and bind it to our own souls. An Authority is the power of the domain, the god that was slain to have."
"And whose power was that? Which God provided the ability to tear space as if it were parchment?" Hermione asked, her eyes practically sparkling with intellectual greed.
"Fenrir," Harry said. Even now, the memory of that wolf would never leave him. The World-Devouring Wolf had been his first kill. It was kind of funny, the Fenrir was the first god he killed because he had been one of his favourite myths as a kid. He had always loved the mythology of the wolf fated to slay Odin.
He stopped in his tracks for a second, a sudden, dark amusement flickering in his eyes. He realized the delicious irony, he, who held the power of the wolf fated to kill the All-Father, was now the same person who had personally executed the God-King Odin at the end. He shook his head at the cosmic joke and continued walking.
"Fenrir? Like… the son of Loki? The Norse beast of Ragnarök?" Hermione asked, struggling to keep up with his effortless strides.
"The very same," Harry nodded. "This power comes from Fenrir's legend, the beast that could not be bound by any chain, any cage, or any barrier devised by the Aesir and could cut through them all with his fangs and claws. With this Authority, I can cut through anything, physical matter, magical shields, or even the very conceptual frame of the world to create a path where none exists. It is the ultimate expression of 'freedom through destruction.'"
"What other Authorities do you have?" Hermione pressed, leaning in close, her personal space abandoned in favor of knowledge.
Harry just laughed and tapped the side of his nose. "That's a secret, Hermione." She let out a small, frustrated whine and pouted, but she couldn't hide the way she looked at him, with a mixture of terror and fascination.
They eventually came to a halt in front of Flourish and Blotts.
"This is where you wanted to go?" she asked, looking between him and the bookstore with genuine confusion. She couldn't imagine her world's Harry Potter going out of his way for a bookstore, he and Ron usually viewed the place as a necessary evil for school supplies. She looked at this version of Harry and had to acknowledge, yet again, how composed and scholarly he seemed.
"Hmm," he hummed, his eyes already scanning the books displayed. "I want to see the divergence in our theories. Our worlds look similar on the surface, but the application and the underlying philosophy of magic could be vastly different. Besides," he added, his eyes glowing with a faint, acquisitive light, "there might be things here, spells, rituals, that don't exist in my world. And I want them."
The next hour was a blur of high-speed research. Harry moved through the shop with a frightening speed that made the store clerk retreat behind the counter. He would pull a book, flip through its three hundred pages in less than 20 seconds, and either toss it back with a look of disdain or add it to an ever-growing pile. For the first time in her life, Hermione Granger found herself overwhelmed by books, the pace Harry set was inhuman.
By the time they escaped to a small, quiet café in a side alley, Harry had a shrunken crate of unique texts tucked away somewhere with that amazing hammer space of his. She needed to learnt that soon.
Tonks, who had been unusually quiet during the shopping trip, a fact that hadn't escaped Hermione, finally spoke up as they sat down with their drinks. She stirred her tea slowly, her hair a muted, thoughtful shade of lavender.
"What am I like… in your world?" she asked, her voice soft, as she looked him in the eye.
Harry froze for a fraction of a second, his hand hovering over his glass of water, before he continued the motion. He took a slow sip, set the glass down, and gave her a long, searching look that seemed to see right through her Metamorphmagus mask.
"Well, to be honest, you're very much the same," he said. "Bubbly, clumsy when you aren't focused, fiercely loyal to your friends, and far more observant than you let on to the public. You're a brilliant Auror, but also a terrible cook."
Tonks leaned in, her eyes searching for something in his. "And what… what am I to you?"
Harry didn't blink. "We're together." He wasnt going to dance around it. He didn't mention it not to influence her, but if she decides to follow that path, then she'd be on her own.
Hermione gasped, nearly knocking over her tea, while Tonks's mouth fell open in pure, unadulterated disbelief.
"Together? Like… dating? In a relationship?" Tonks echoed, her voice squeaking.
"But what about…?" Hermione started, then trailed off, glancing at Tonks, who started blushing.
"Remus?" Harry finished for her. He saw the flicker of pain and longing in Tonks's eyes, guessed the old wolf was still taking his time with her, too. "In my world, things didn't work out. You two wanted different things, he was too buried in his own self-loathing, obsessed with the idea that he was a monster, and you needed someone who could actually meet you halfway. It ended, and we moved on."
Tonks bit her lip, looking disappointed and slightly frustrated, and Harry felt a small twinge of amusement. "Anyway," he continued, "we started dating a while after that. And now, in my world, we're actually engaged."
"ENGAGED?!" both girls shouted, drawing startled looks from the other café patrons.
Harry shrugged, his expression unreadable. Technically, he was engaged to all his "consorts," but explaining the harem dynamics was not what he wanted at the moment. "How did you even figure out something was up?" he asked, looking at Tonks.
She took a few seconds to adjust her hair color to a vibrant, glowing pink before giving him a teasing, confident smile. "Well, I'm an Auror," she said, as if that explained anything.
"I noticed the way you kept shooting glances my way back at the house, it wasn't just 'looking. I knew you knew me, but I didn't expect that close."
"That, and you definitely seemed to favor Tonks even when you were being a 'cold king' back at Grimmauld Place," Hermione added, her voice a mix of jealousy and realization, somehow having a version of her best friend not even care all that much hurts.
Harry shook his head. "Well, that's that." He stood up, the chair scraping against the floor with finality. The girls felt the shift in his mood instantly,
"Well, I guess it's time," he said, a grin spreading across his face, a grin that was far too sharp for a human, the kind of smile that made Gods check their throats for blades.
"Time? Time for what?" Hermione asked, clutching her bag to her chest.
"Breaking into Gringotts, of course. We have a soul to burn."
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