Harry Potter and the Death's Head Mark

PROLOGUE:

"It will be sometime in September 1942," Miller told him. "It's impossible to be any more precise."

"That's fine," said Harry, absently. September 1942. Riddle would be fifteen, and starting his fifth year at Hogwarts. He had opened the Chamber of Secrets and killed his father and grandparents in 1943. He had disappeared in 1946 and returned to Hogwarts in 1957, to ask Dumbledore for the position of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.

He'd killed his parents in 1981.

Harry forced his mind from the past. He looked at the two men beside him, Miller and Smith. Ryan J. Miller, a lean man who looked to be in his fifties, with silver hair and hard blue eyes. Sam B. Smith, a wiry man about a decade older, who wore balding hair and sweater vests--a strange contrast to Miller, who always wore as many weapons as his clothes could hide. They were a funny pair, Miller and Smith.

He had found them in a pub in Knockturn Alley. They introduced themselves as men who were "something like Aurors," despite lacking the ability to manipulate magic. They were old men, long retired, but still itching to fight against "the evils that plague our land."

The time machine had been Smith's idea, as he'd known that American wizards had experimented with time in ways the Department of Mysteries deemed unsafe. Apparently, he knew this because he'd once worked with them.

Smith was the theorist of the pair, the expert on the time machine itself. Miller was the realist, the fighter. And, if a cellar filled with Kalashnikovs was any indication, perhaps a little on the shady side of the law. Harry never asked--he was past caring about such things.

Both men were squibs, or perhaps outright muggles. This meant that Harry had had to bear the brunt of the battle that inevitably broke out when they went to steal the time machine. But Harry hadn't minded; he'd found the fight almost exhilarating. Finally, he was doing something. Not hiding behind the Dursleys or the Order (or Dumbledore), but fighting. He had a plan.

He frowned, thinking of how his friends would react if they could know his plans. "You can't kill a boy!" Hermione would say. "He hasn't done anything wrong yet!" As for Ron...Ron would have agreed with him once, but then he had--then--

Then they had died. They were dead now, killed by Death Eaters while covering Harry's escape from a besieged Diagon Alley. He'd thought they were right behind him, but they'd stopped to fight--stopped deliberately, stopped so that he could get away...

Hermione would be disappointed in him now. But, as she was dead, it no longer mattered. All that mattered was the war, and winning it.

Besides, Harry had declined to travel to the only other window before Voldemort's rise--March 1926, when Tom Riddle had been a mere infant. He would not kill a crying baby who hadn't yet learned to talk, let alone talk to snakes. But that was enough honor for him. He had no qualms about killing a deranged adolescent about to unleash a basilisk on the entire school.

No qualms at all.

"Potter," Smith said from right behind him. Once Harry would have jumped at such a startling summons, but he was getting used to it. Now he didn't even flinch. "Are you ready?"

"Yes," Potter said softly.

It was time.

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The world became black.

For a moment, Harry thought he had died. The sensation was not unpleasant...he remembered turning his head and expecting to see Sirius, but then the dark formless void around him shifted and everything became white.

Purest, dazzling, shining white light. Harry closed his eyes against it, but the light shone on, unhindered. The light wasn't outside of him--his eyelids could not guard against it, it was inside his eyelids, inside him...

It hurt so much that he thought he would go blind.

Then the light blessfully retreated, and the world was neither black nor white. It was a sort of blue, or perhaps gray...

Harry heard the voices of Smith and Miller in his head, briefing him on what he was about to face.

"We will be transported to 1942," Smith said. "1942 was an important year. It was the first time Dumbledore and Grindelwald fought, and an important year for the Muggle war effort as well."

"There's an old story," Miller added. "They say in 1940, after the Germans took Paris, Adolph Hitler stood on the French shore and looked across the English Channel. He could've taken England then, and it would've fallen easily."

"But he chose to invade Russia instead," said Smith. Both men paused, as if their statement were somehow important. But Harry, who had never quite learned wizarding history, let alone the muggle sort, knew that there was something he couldn't quite catch, something significant to the tone of their voice and the way they told him... "That was a mistake. The Russian campaign was disastrous. It started out well, but in '42 it began to go badly. The winter was terrible that year and battalions of men died of the cold. And, the thing is, the new war spread the German forces between two separate fronts. Instead of merely fighting the Allies in the west, there were now enemies in the east too. Germany was sandwiched between them. In the end, both sides kept coming until they met in the middle of the fallen German Reich."

"What do you know about Grindelwald?" Miller had asked him, on another occasion.

"He was a dark lord," Harry replied. "Dumbledore defeated him in...1944?"

Miller frowned. "1945."

1945...

Harry did not know much history, but he knew enough to know that 1945 was the year that World War II ended, the year Hitler was defeated. He wondered if there was a connection between the two wars, the wizard one and the muggle one. He tried to remember something from his history class, only to recall that Binns had never been able to make it to the 1800s in the fifth-year course focusing on recent history, let alone to 1945.

1945...

He could almost feel the year pass through him. It was somehow tangible, but no more than a wisp of wind. As subtle as a cast Imperius curse, slinking across a darkened room to its target.

1944...That was "D-Day" wasn't it? With the Americans, and Normandy...

1943...the year the Chamber was opened, the year the Riddles died...

1942...

He'd arrived.

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"Keep him alive."

Harry was lying on the floor, somehow immobilized. But how...? Petrificus totalus? But...the only others there were Smith and Miller, and they were muggles...

Harry saw the reason in Smith's hand. A tazer.

Strength was already returning to Harry's limbs, but Miller held another reason to stay still, a reason far more compelling than Smith's.

A gun. A Walther pistol, pointed at Harry's head.

"Lord Grindelwald will want to see him," Smith was saying. Miller kept his gun trained on Harry, his finger a micron away from the trigger.

They had betrayed him! Harry felt his face flush with fury--and embarrassment too. He should have been able to see it, to tell they were lying to him. But they had duped him, and now...

Now it was too late.

He could practically hear Voldemort's high-pitched laughter.

Miller tilted his head, but the gun didn't waver. "Don't look at us like that, Herr Potter, we are soldiers like you. We've been loyal for fifty-two years, waiting for the opportunity. You provided it."

"Loyal?" Harry spat. "To who? Grindelwald?" How could they be loyal to Grindelwald? They were muggles, and he was a wizard, a dark lord...He'd been the precursor of Voldemort, how had German muggles ever gained any sort of loyalty to him? Unless...

Harry thought of Grindelwald and tried to match the name with a face. But no face came, except the mustached profile of Adolph Hitler.

"We will tell you," said Miller, his blue eyes boring into Harry's (his mother's) green ones. "One soldier to another."

"Then tell me," Harry spat. Damn cowards. They hadn't even had the guts to fight him to his face.

But that's how it is, a little voice inside Harry said. That's how it is in war. You must become a Slytherin to survive, and, Harry, you just weren't clever enough.

"He won't believe you." Smith sighed, but waved a hand in a gesture that bade Miller continue. Harry noticed that he too had a gun.

Miller began again. "My name is not Miller, but Rudolf Mueller. And my comrade here isn't Smith, but Schmidt. We are German."

"So you're Nazis," Harry replied coolly. He could see where this was going.

"You didn't see what happened after the war before this one," Miller--no, Mueller--replied fervently, doubtless reacting to Harry's fierce look. He looked strange, standing over him in the dim light of what looked to be...a warehouse...with a curious look in his eyes. There was determination there, and excitement (at being back in the war, at being able to do something) but also a curious sort of...sadness. Sadness for him, the boy at his feet, a fallen enemy, but a fellow warrior as well. It was the look Draco had had in his eyes before Harry killed him.

"The Great War," Mueller explained. "The war to end all wars. It wasn't as civilized as this one--they used poison gas, and bombs were just as likely to destroy the sender as to hit the target. There was no reason for it either, only some Scheiss about an archduke getting shot...That didn't matter, though, not a whit--everyone hated each other enough to begin the cursing without reason. And the kids..." Mueller shook his head. "The kids thought it'd be an adventure." He paused again, then continued: "And when the war was over--a war that everyone was to be blamed for--do you know what they did?"

Mueller's eyes grew wild with rage--and grief--and Schmidt had to take up the narrative. "They put all the blame on the nation left weakest," Schmidt said, his tone more detached, more scientific about it. But the shadow was there in his eyes too, just as it was in Mueller's. "My Deutschland," he whispered, like a child calling for his mother. "My Vaterland. And--" The shadow withdrew, replaced by a fiery anger. "--the wizards who fought, do you know what happened to them? What happened after my country's unconditional surrender?"

Schmidt fell silent, and Mueller picked up the fallen thread. "They took the strongest wizards and drained their magic." His words rang hollow in Harry's ears. What did he mean...'drained their magic'? What could that mean...?

"Made them little more than squibs," Schmidt rephrased.

"The best and brightest of an entire generation, drained," said Mueller, his voice oddly emotionless. "They were wizards one minute, and muggles the next." He paused, then added: "It happened to me." He rolled up his left sleeve. Harry, in his confusion, half-expected to see a Dark Mark there, but what he saw was almost worse.

There were scars on the skin, and discolorations. Parts of the skin looked greenish in the light. An image rose in Harry's mind, an image of hundreds on leeches nesting on Mueller's arm, sucking his magic away.

"And me," said Schmidt. His right arm cradled his left, but he did not reveal what was beneath the sleeve.

Both men were silent. Harry looked at the guns and knew that now was the time to jump them, now while they were caught in the throes of emotion, it was the best chance to catch them off-guard...but somehow he just couldn't move.

"We had a Hogwarts of our own once," Schmidt whispered. Harry recognized the tone. It was the tone of a grief too strong for tears, a grief almost too strong for anger, a grief expressed in monosyllables and emotionless words. "A German school for magic. But this...this crime, this monstrous crime...destroyed the entire generation. We had no wizards strong enough to teach, so the school was closed. It was what the other nations wanted. Now they could rest, secure that Germany had no strength to launch a wizards' war."

"But some escaped."

"Grindelwald was among them."

"And we rallied behind them." A light came into Mueller's eyes. "We could no longer curse, but we could shoot. We could not fly combat-brooms, but we could fly planes. We grew to respect the muggles then, and combined their ways with our own. And then the next generation, the one unsullied by the enemy, grew up and learned to fight."

"To fight as wizards," Schmidt clarified. He bared his teeth in a proud grin.

Mueller put a hand on Harry's shoulder--an almost fatherly gesture--and withdrew a faded handkerchief from his pocket. Harry glared at it. Did the man think he was going to cry? Did he mean to play father and wipe away a little boy's tears?

"This is why we're fighting, Herr Potter."

But you're fighting for Hitler! Harry wanted to say. The Holocaust was one of the few lessons he remembered from muggle school. The concentration camps, and the Bombing of London, and Hiroshima.

Then again, Mueller and Schmidt were serving a dark wizard--what would they care about a few eleven million dead?

He tried to stop them, he tried to remove Mueller's hand, he tried to rake his fingers through his captor's eyes--but he couldn't move. Mueller was pressing the handkerchief on Harry's nose and mouth and he was tired now, so tired...

"That's it, mein Junge," Mueller said. "Don't fight it. This is not your war; you can rest now.

"We know about Tom Riddle. We know about Voldemort's rise.

"And, because we know, we will make sure it does not happen.

"Our future is safe from Voldemort, and it will be a brighter one, you'll see...

"So, sleep, Harry Potter. You deserve some rest."

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By the time Harry Potter woke up, it was too late.

Under the advice of Grindelwald, Hitler had already halted his advance into Russia and rerouted his troops for an invasion of England.

Miles away, in a mighty stone castle, Slytherin prefect Tom Marvolo Riddle woke up to a piercing headache and a sky glowing with lightning. It took him a glass of Dreamless Sleep potion to ignore it.

The Nazis marched.