Erasure

"I wish Voldemort had never been born!" Harry exclaimed angrily, one morning at breakfast, after having had yet another nightmare about Voldemort.

"I'm sure nearly everyone here wishes that, but you can't change history. There's no way to do it," replied Ron.

"What about a Time Turner?"

"Those only take you back an hour per turn, and besides, Hermione gave her one back to Professor McGonagall at the end of our third year. Even if you did get your hands on one, you'd never be able to count how many hours you'd need for a seventy-year trip, not to mention that you'd have to get back the hard way: one day at a time."

"There must be other methods of time-travel, though."

"If there are, I don't know 'em."

"If I could go back in time and prevent Voldemort's parents from meeting, then he would never have been born, and none of his reigns of terror would ever have occurred."

"YOU might never have been born if Voldemort never existed," said Ron.

"Frankly, I don't care. I've lived such a miserable life, that non-existence would probably be better for me," replied Harry, bitterly.

"Miserable? Come on, Harry! You love it here at Hogwarts."

"I'd like it better if I didn't have to worry about some crazed lunatic being out for my blood."

"Don't worry, Harry. You'll kill him off one day."

"Not if he kills me first."

"You've gone up against him four times, five if you count when you were a baby, and every time you've survived. You're a survivor, Harry. You're far more likely to kill Voldemort than he is to kill you."

"You're actually using his name without fear in your voice, Ron. I'm proud of you."

"I guess Dumbledore's message finally sank into me: fear of the name increases fear of the thing."

"Now you're starting to sound like Dumbledore," replied Harry; with the first grin he'd shown all term.

Harry spent all his free time over the next four months in the library, researching methods of time-travel. This also included sneaking into the Restricted Section under his invisibility cloak. He was making very little, if any, progress in his field of research, until one day, when he stumbled upon a handwritten book with the Ravenclaw and Gryffindor crests on the spine.

The book was titled "The Book of Chaos: an essential companion for troublemakers". Browsing through the book, Harry recognised some of the various pieces of handwriting inside as being that of Remus Lupin and Sirius Black. The Potions section had a good ten to twenty percent in Harry's godfather's handwriting. Evidently, Sirius was quite the Potions whiz when he was a student. Looking through the Spells section, Harry found a lot of corrections and new entries in Remus Lupin's slightly untidy handwriting. Among the spells by Lupin, Harry found exactly what he was looking for: a time-travel spell that could also take you anywhere in space as well as time. For such a complex task, the spell was surprisingly simple in appearance. All you had to do was to write your destination place and time on a piece of paper, then cast the spell while holding onto the paper. There was a warning from Remus, though. The spell had the nasty side effect of temporarily upsetting the senses, causing them to receive garbled information. If using the spell for time-travel, the effects would last longer, the further you travelled in time. According to Remus: "One year of travel translates to approximately one minute of side-effects, two if the trip is backwards in time."

'Now I've got a means of time travel, I need a plan to eliminate Voldemort. Now, how do I do that?' thought Harry.

Voldemort had killed his father when he was a teenager, so if he could be tricked or persuaded into killing his father before he was even conceived, then that would erase Voldemort from history. This sounded like the perfect plan to Harry, so he wrote two places and times on some spare parchment.

Riddle House Gardens, 1 January 1924, 17:30

Hogwarts Library, 1 January 1943, 01:00

Harry put the first piece of parchment in his pocket, and then cast the spell using the second piece. Remus was right about the side effects. All Harry could perceive for the next two hours was the sensory equivalent of static on an untuned TV. Harry fell asleep long before the effects wore off, and woke again just as it was getting light. Harry had prepared a story to try and persuade the young Tom Riddle into helping him but, to make it believable, Harry needed to make a few cosmetic changes to himself. Using a few spells he had learned in Transfiguration and Charms, Harry made himself look like he'd been into a number of fights and been injured a number of times via Muggle methods. He looked like he'd been beaten, burnt, cut, and had taken a few bullet wounds on his torso, legs, and arms. He also charmed his left eye to look like it had been ruined by a knife-wound and put a long scar on the left side of his face. Harry also dirtied himself with a charm to help make it look like he had been fighting for months, without the opportunity or incentive to get clean. Harry's skin was stained brown with dirt, blackened by smoke, and had dried blood smeared on it. Deciding some blood on his robes and some holes and tears would add to the effect, Harry used a very precise Severing Charm on various places on his robes. Conjuring up a mirror, Harry examined his handiwork. He looked like he'd been through Hell twice over. If this wasn't convincing enough, then he didn't know what was. Remembering what Tom Riddle looked like, Harry banished the mirror, threw his invisibility cloak over himself and set out to find him.

Knowing that Tom Riddle was in Slytherin, Harry headed for the Slytherin dungeons and waited by the wall that led into the Slytherin common room. As soon as he saw Tom step out of the room, he grabbed him and ushered him into an empty classroom and locked the door.

"What the hell do you think you are doing?" Tom demanded.

"Shut up and listen to me," replied Harry, pulling off the invisibility cloak. "I've come back in time to change history, and you are going to help me."

"Why?"

"At some point between now and my time, you attempt to take over the world, and reveal us to the Muggles. Your filthy Muggle father kills you personally, and leads a genocidal campaign against all wizards."

"The Muggles try and wipe us out?" asked Tom, looking rather shocked.

"They don't simply try, they actually succeed. As far as I know, I'm the last wizard left alive in my time. Every other wizard has been killed by the Muggles."

"I find that a bit hard to believe."

"Well, you had better believe it, because it's true. Look at me, do I look like someone who has lived a life like you are living now?"

Harry certainly hoped that Tom was buying his story. The story sounded plausible enough to Harry, so he could only hope that Tom was convinced by Harry's tale and cosmetic changes.

"What do you need me to do?" asked Tom.

Harry gave a sigh of relief that Tom believed him.

"I need you to come with me and kill your father before he meets your mother. If your parents never meet, then you will never be born, you won't try and take over the world, and the Muggles will never start their genocidal campaign. If you never existed, then the Muggles would never have found us out and exterminated us. You have to do this, Tom, or would you rather have every wizard on the face of the planet dead?"

"You want me, a Slytherin, to sacrifice my life, a Gryffindor thing, for all the other wizards in the world?"

"Yes!"

"You're insane!"

"I most certainly am not! What good would it do you if you don't do as I say? I know you don't like taking orders, Tom, but you have to do this, or our entire civilization will be wiped out. It's your choice, Tom: sacrifice your existence and have everyone else live, or don't sacrifice yourself, and have the Muggles wipe us out."

Tom was silent for quite a while before answering.

"Fine. I'll do it. When do we leave?"

"Right now. Hold onto this parchment with me while I perform the spell. Your senses will be scrambled for about half an hour after the trip, though." Harry held out the parchment with the earlier date on it, and Tom held onto it while Harry performed the spell.

"Where are we?" asked Tom, once the sensory scrambling had worn off.

"Your father's house, about two years before your birth," replied Harry.

"I'm going to go and curse him. How does Avada Kedavra sound?"

"No. Don't curse him. We need to make it look like an accident for the Muggles of this time. Any ideas?"

"How about I curse him in that car over there?" suggested Tom.

"Perfect. This way it will look like he had a heart attack in the car, was unable to control it, and crashed the car. Perhaps I should sabotage the brakes, as well?"

"How do you know so much about cars?"

"I grew up in a household of the worst Muggles you could possibly meet. They even tried to kill me, but I got them first," Harry added with a nasty grin. Harry, of course, hadn't really killed the Dursleys, but he had to make things sound good for Tom's benefit.

"Wait - you mean you're a Mudblood?" demanded Tom, glaring at Harry.

"How dare you?" Harry reacted immediately, glaring back. "No! My real parents were dead, and they were just my foster parents, if you can apply that term to those idiots. If I didn't need your help now I'd suffocate you on the spot."

Tom backed away from Harry's ferocious glare. "I think I get the picture."

"No. I don't think you do. They hated me. They made me live in a bloody cupboard for ten whole years. They did whatever they could to make my life miserable and avoided spending money on me like the plague, and even when they did, they always got the cheapest rubbish available. Your life at that Muggle orphanage may not be that good, but let me tell you, it is ten-thousand times better than where I had to live. Do you know whose fault it is that my childhood was so bad? I'll tell you: your future self!"

Tom now looked sincerely scared of Harry's ferocious temper and resulting outburst, the content of which was more-or-less accurate to Harry's real life.

"I'll, uh, go and stand guard while you work on the car, shall I?" said Tom, still looking rather frightened.

"You do that," snapped Harry. "I'll let you know when I'm finished."

Harry spent a while working on the car before Tom managed to bring up the courage to speak to Harry again.

"So, how many Muggles have you killed?" inquired Tom in a conciliatory tone, as he stood guard, keeping an eye out for his father.

"Let's see, the Dursleys were the horrible ones I had to grow up with, that's three, then there were numerous skirmishes with Muggles. I tried to avoid killing in those, but the total is probably around fifty or sixty by now," replied Harry while poking around underneath the car with his wand.

"Sixty Muggles dead at your hand. I'm impressed."

"It's not something I'm particularly proud of. Well, there is the exception of the Dursleys. They were a group who deserved what they got. The others, well, they were just casualties of war. It was kill-or-be-killed. Simple as that."

"I never really thought that trying to take over the world could result in our extinction."

"Yeah, well, it does. That's why we're here now, to prevent the possibility of that occurring. There. I'm done. They don't have the safety precautions in these old cars that modern ones have. This seems almost too easy. Let's hide and get ready to AK your father."

"AK?" asked Tom.

"Short for Avada Kedavra. It's a sort of slang we've developed in the future during the war against the Muggles."

Harry and Tom went and hid in some bushes from which they could see the car and the driveway.

"What will happen to us if we succeed in our ... mission?" asked Tom.

"We will both vanish from this time, given that you never existed to give me a reason to go back in time and prevent you from turning bad in the first place."

"So, you've gone back in time before?" asked Tom.

"Yes, you were about twenty then. I told you of what the future would bring if you went and pursued the Dark Arts, but you just thought I was crazy. Look! Someone's approaching the car. I think it might be your father."

The figure started the car and started off down the driveway, picking up speed as it went down the hill. Tom raised his wand and fired the Killing Curse at the occupant. Harry and Tom began to fade out, but not before they got to watch the fate of the car. Within seconds of Tom's casting the Killing Curse, the car was speeding down the hill out of control, thanks to the dead driver, and it smashed into a tree at the bottom of the hill and exploded in a huge fireball. Harry and Tom finally vanished from the spot where they had been standing with triumphant grins on their faces.

With Tom Riddle's father out of the picture, the witch that was to have been Voldemort's mother never met him and Tom Marvolo Riddle was never born. With no Tom Riddle, the 1942 Basilisk attacks at Hogwarts never took place and thus, Myrtle Green never died in that toilet. She instead went on to become the Divination teacher at Hogwarts for seventy years before leaving the post. Without Voldemort, the pureblood wizarding families lost their influence and the corruption in the Ministry of Magic was at rock-bottom levels by the mid-1980s. Without Voldemort's reign of terror in the 1970s, many innocent people lived, and the wizarding community grew. Those innocent people included Molly Weasley's brothers, Gideon and Fabian Prewett, whose children gave Ron Weasley several cousins who had never had the chance to be born in the original timeline.

As for Harry Potter, his parents were never betrayed by Wormtail. They instead lived to raise Harry and see him go through his Hogwarts career as a perfectly normal wizard who had a knack for practical jokes. Best of all, Harry never had any memories of the horrible life he had lived before his trip back in time.