Second Chance Chapter 1

This is an old story that I only ever wrote one chapter for, that I recently decided to rewrite and post. It was one of the first things I posted on the Patreon, but Patreon's content filter took it down and I gave up on the story (because I didn't realize yet that their AI just takes down random posts pretty much, and nothing was actually wrong with the story.

I'm going to start writing it again, although my main focus right now is getting more work done on Growth Spurt and getting Wizard and the Witch to the point it can be posted publicly.

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Harry devoted his entire life to stopping Voldemort, ultimately dying to do it. In a world torn to shreds by their fighting, the only thing that kept him going was the company of his wives.

Yet when he dies, he immediately finds himself in the past, in a world where Harry Potter lost his trial and had his wand snapped before his fifth year. Harry won't let anything - not Azkaban, not the corrupt ministry, and not even Voldemort himself - stop him from reconnecting with his wives and giving them the lives they deserve.

When a Second Chance falls into your lap, you have to make it count.

A story with a mix of porn and plot. Enjoy!

~

Devastation.

That was the only word that could come close to describing this. Harry trudged forward, running off of pure willpower and nothing else.

His steps squelched in reddish much. The ground had become soft, weakened by unholy amounts of spellfire and, in places, splatters of blood. Harry stepped over bodies. There was only one he was interested in, and that one wasn’t quite dead yet.

He trudged between the thick stone remnants of what was once a castle. It had been a marvel of architecture at one time, but now it was nothing more than scattered hunks of rubble. The ground turned from soft to crispy, blackened in a long cone-shaped crater. At the very end of this enormous shape, one body lay alone, flat on its back and drawing slow rattling breaths.

Harry stumbled. He dropped his wand, stubborn fingers giving out and going slack. That was fine. He limped the last bit of his self-imposed journey, doing everything he could to ignore the awful burning sensation in his stomach.

When he finally stopped in front of the body, he just stood there, watching, listening to those raspy breaths rattling out one at a time. They were the only sound for miles. If he listened closely, he could even hear that each breath was shallower than the one that came before it. Slowly, the dying body lifted its head, looking Harry in the eyes.

“Fuck you,” Harry said to it.

The body — Lord Voldemort — laughed. It was not a pretty sound. In fact, it was an awfully insane sound, fueled by raw mania.

“Poor dying Potter,” Voldemort rasped. “Couldn’t save a thing.”

“Go to hell, Tom,” Harry said.

“There is no Hell! You should know that, Harry. From here, we go to nowhere, destined to be forgotten. But tell me. If there were a Hell, do you honestly think it could be worse than this?”

Harry looked around them. His eyes slid over the piled bodies of dark creatures and the last remaining Death Eaters Harry hadn’t killed off before by hand. 

He didn’t care about how many there were; in fact, it filled him with a kind of pride. They didn’t deserve pity, even in death. But as Harry kept looking, he picked out other bodies. These ones made him scowl.

“You ruined everything,” Harry growled. “Killed everything. Burned the world to the ground. And for what?”

“Yet you were with me every step of the way,” Voldemort growled back. “If I burned this world, so did you! Answer your own question.”

“I fought to stop you,” Harry said.

Voldemort sneered. “And did you ever stop to think, during your righteous fight, whether anyone would thank you for that? Think of the world you entered as that squishy little eleven year old I should’ve killed off like a common puppy. The Ministry could’ve been happy with my rule! Half of your friends, those with good blood, would’ve been spared!”

The outburst devolved into coughing, and when Voldemort hacked out flem against the ground, it was bright red.

“You killed us both,” he repeated. “Killed us for nothing.”

“Fuck you,” Harry repeated.

He leaned over, planting his boot on Tom Riddle’s throat. Leaning forward, he cut off the man’s flow of air, something that the neverending rituals the dark lord subjected himself too could never counter. 

Harry was an expert at killing the man by now. He’d done it three different times. But there was always another Horcrux, always somewhere for the monster’s soul to flee to and return.

Harry graduated Hogwarts a decade ago. He’d been fighting ever since. Yet as his skills grew, the number of people he cherished kept shrinking. The fighting never stopped, and it always came with casualties.

Images flitted through Harry’s head of seven faces, each burned forever into his memory forever. They lay around this very battleground now, many of them unrecognizable. That last thought filled Harry’s throat with bile… so he spat it out, letting it splatter across Voldemort’s face as a final insult.

This was the place they first met, Harry and those seven. He hardly knew half of them then, even though they walked the same halls and attended the same classes. Yet without their support, he never would’ve made it this far.

Made it this far for what? whispered a treacherous voice inside his head.

They were gone. Everything was gone. Here he and Voldemort stood, dying, and not even Hogwarts, the school crafted by the legendary founders, had withstood the wrath they directed at one another.

Something crunched under Harry’s boot. Voldemort’s body shook, breaking down slowly. Harry could watch it happen in real time. He felt himself smile.

It wasn’t exactly a happy smile, but it was something. He’d been reminded of what mattered.

Even if he lost everything, so did Voldemort. Tom Riddle might put up a brave front, but all that talk about this being Harry’s fault too, only showed that he was truly upset about how things turned out.

Just like he had always been, Tom Riddle was terrified of death. Harry pressed his boot down harder.

“You… Dying… Too!” Riddle hissed out.

“I know.” Harry tilted his head, his glasses sliding off, blurring his vision once more. “This curse will be the end of me.”

He touched his own stomach, which was heating up rapidly. The feeling reminded him of burning your finger on a working oven, except it was coming from inside of him, and it was still getting hotter.

“You… You…” 

Voldemort’s eyes widened. He didn’t even have enough air to make more words leave his throat. Harry’s boot twisted. With a pop that carried a distinctive finality, the dark lord moved no more. Harry stumbled, finally allowing himself to fall.

He tried to manipulate his fall so that it would be back the way he came, but in the end his body simply collapsed across Voldemort’s ankles. He’d wanted to see the others as he died, to be able to look at them one more time, no matter what state their bodies were in now.

The others… His wives. That was what was proper to call them: they’d insisted on a proper ceremony just last month, before all of this went down. 

Harry thought that was slightly crazy. Seven wives, one wizard? But they pulled out examples to prove that it had been done before. Merlin had eight in his life; Godric Gryffindor thirteen. 

Plus, they said it was worth it. They had insisted that whatever happened afterwards, none of them would regret it. Harry went along with it. And now? He could honestly say they had been right. As they usually were.

There was something comforting about it. Thinking about them… thinking of them as his wives… made it feel like his life had been as crappy as it really was. It made him feel like he truly lived.

For a moment, bitterness crept back in. What if he had met all of them when they were younger? What if they had done everything sooner? It felt like wasted time, all those years spent as strangers. If only he could fix it…

Harry gasped. The heat in his stomach was becoming unbearable. Ironically, he knew the curse that was going to kill him.

It was an organ melter. A truly nasty spell, this one, capable of liquifying the human body one critical function at a time. It was designed to be slow enough for the victim to feel it.

Harry looked up everything about this curse because he was introduced to it early. It was what Bellatrix hit Sirius with, sending him through the Veil. Thankfully for his godfather, that fall had most likely given him a quick death. Harry was not going to be that lucky.

He could already feel the way the curse was hopping between his organs, scraping them down into nothing one agonizing second at a time.

When the pain became too much, Harry shut his eyes. Somehow, this helped him feel a little bit better.

The pain was, if anything, only getting worse. But focusing on his surroundings made Harry feel less alone, somehow. It was as if he could feel comforting magic.

That should have been impossible. The wards had been torn to shreds ages ago during the battle, along with the rest of Hogwarts. There should’ve been next to nothing left of Harry’s first home. And yet, as he lay there on the charred ground gasping for breath, he felt as if he were back there, back in his first year.

“Sorry… Old… Friend,” Harry stammered, struggling to speak the same way Voldemort had at the end. If he needed one more sign that his death was imminent, that was it.

The pain only grew, and grew, until it all stopped very abruptly, and Harry realized distantly that he had died.

It was a sensation he was partially familiar with. He had technically been killed once already, when Voldemort nailed him with a killing curse in a duel in France. Harry had come straight back, rid of a piece of Voldemort’s soul that had unbeknownst to them been jammed in his skull for his whole life.

After that time when he was one year old, then again in his first year, and in that duel, Harry could confidently say he was the king of second chances. If he had to put money on it, though, he was fresh out of them now.

Later, he would realize very belatedly that it was good he wasn’t a betting man.

Harry’s soul separated from his body. Usually, he would expect for it to drift up. If he were unlucky it would remain in the air as his lingering attachments turned him into a ghost. That would be the worst thing he could imagine, stuck alone in this wreck of a world forever. But even if he weren’t turning into a ghost, drifting up seemed to make the most sense.

Instead, he drifted down.

It was hard to describe how he was sensing this. Normal senses like sight, smell, and touch had abandoned him. But he could just feel it. With absolute certainty, he knew that his soul was going directly down.

The deeper he got, the warmer things became. His soul felt like it was growing more energized, rather than less, the further it got from his body. With a start, he realized he recognized this sensation.

It was magic.

He recalled something that Hermione, the first of his wives, had told him a long time ago. Hogwarts was built where it was because this was the place multiple leylines converged. It was literally a hotspot of magic, one of the most extreme ones in the entire world. And as Harry sunk down, he could feel that magic doing SOMETHING.

Somehow, that something felt an awful lot like giving him a hug.

It just felt welcoming. A warm sensation swept him, the complete opposite of the burning of Voldemort’s last curse, this one feeling warm in the way that fresh cookies do, when they settle in your stomach. Harry felt like he was being coddled. 

Coddled by something immensely powerful.

Maybe… And Harry was just guessing here, without Hermione on hand to explain the confusing bits to him… but he wondered for the first time if the castle itself wasn’t where Hogwarts’s seeming sentience came from. The stones were torn down and destroyed, and yet this FELT like Hogwarts.

If it were true, and the magic itself beneath the school was what every student had known, it clearly knew him. And remembered him. The hug-like sensation grew tighter, and Harry sensed that something was about to happen.

GO.

The external word sounded awkward, and in fact, Harry thought it wasn’t a word it all. It was the sentiment that the word represented. Something that couldn’t speak, but could think, was giving him an offer.

Or maybe an order. Because suddenly, without any input of his own, Harry’s soul was catapulted to somewhere different.

He couldn’t describe the sensations of the trip, only of the landing. It felt cold, and hard, and wet: all things that were sensations known only to the living. Harry blinked. He had eyes that could see. He slid his hand sideways, feeling it move across slick mildew covered stone. 

Not knowing what else to do, he began to laugh.

The sound slipped through iron bars in front of him, pinging down the hallway. Other voices rose up, a few laughing but most screaming, either in pain or telling him to shut up.

Harry didn’t care. He was locked away in some kind of grim, awful prison. He just didn’t care! And you know why?
 Because he was alive. He had done it, through some arcane favor he hadn’t even known was possible. Harry Potter lived.

There was no stymying the cackles that escaped him in a raucous stream. Sometimes (rarely), it was damn good to be Harry Potter.

The king of second chances had found one more from deep in his back pocket.