Dolohov's curse actually does manage to kill Hermione and Harry loses his friend.

The fic would then go on to show how Harry's future adventures are impacted by this.

 

I was thinking of something along the same lines - set in the same year, at least.

Voldemort's connection with Harry starts to take its toll on him, à la the One Ring from LOTR. He starts getting flashes of the past, splitting headaches that leave him weak and tired, and it doesn't help that the entire Wizarding World is intent on making him out to be a liar.

For the first time, Hogwarts doesn't seem like home to him. The castle's walls are cold and unfriendly, the corridors never-ending and narrow. Harry has sudden flashes of terrible anger - even from innocent slip-ups by his friend - and he's horrified to realize that he's contemplating cursing his own friends.

That's about what I've thought of it. I was always fascinated by Harry's fight with himself in OOTP, and if Voldemort were truly like he was described in the first books, he'd be in a bad way.

What next? He either goes psycopath, starting with an accidental murder of Umbridge, further cemented by him killing Dumbledore when he's confronted. After a series of deaths where Harry finds that the Dark Arts come terrifyingly naturally to him and that killing people with magic is far easier than subduing them, he has a moment of relapse at the very end and kills himself along with Voldemort.

In this version, I'd probably write in him taking advantage of the fact that Ginny's sort of obsessed with him - a reflection of Voldemort and Bellatrix. JKR made Ginny almost flawless, but her only weakness, apparently, was Harry. Why not take advantage of that? She becomes the unwilling accomplice who's fighting against her own beliefs and the idea of the boy she thought she loved. Maybe he goads/forces her into taking a life of her own, and she's so horrified that she has no choice but to go along.

Alternately, Dumbledore catches him when he's about to kill Umbridge, and subdues him and obliviates her. Harry has a meltdown, involving a duel with Dumbledore through the halls of Hogwarts, where Tom takes him over for intermittent flashes. In the end, Dumbledore takes Harry with him on a dangerous journey to subdue the darkness within him, taking him under his wing in the process. Again, a quest inspired by Tolkien.

/~/

Phew. A lot of that wrote itself.

 

@DC - This needs to be written (either plot).

 

A little plot bunny that I call The Great Harry Potter Crossover.

It starts when fifteen years old Harry finds himself facing Voldemort in the Department of Mysteries. With no help from Dumbledore, who is just a minute too late, all he can do is run away from the Dark Lord until they both end up in the Infinity Room. It's a place that was created to research a theory of parallel worlds, but with not much success. Until now.

Wanting to prove his complete superiority over his foe Voldemort forces Priori Incantatem. The released magic empowers the room and imprints locked in a battle enemies across the multiverse.

The result is an inclusion of two new characters in different universes. While they are outsiders, the worlds try to make them fit their own settings. Sometimes it means that they are completely merged and reborn as people or beings from said universe, with very little memory of their other life, maybe just a feeling that there is someone they must find and fight with, and even less magic. Other time they literary appear out of nowhere fully aware that they somehow were transported from the Infinity Room to different world.

At the same time, their fight continues in their universe and sum of victories across the multiverse will determine which one will win.

1) HP/DF

Harry appears in a distant past and because of small miscommunication is called Merlin (shouldn't use it as a swear word). After his adventures with Artur, he is trapped by Morgana on the Demonreach. He sends there more than thousand years and is finally released by Dresden when he needs help with the Outsiders and their leader, He Who Flies Above. It's a quite surprise to everybody how well Merlin is getting used to modern times.

2) HP/LotR.

Harry wakes up in the forest with only distant recollection of who he is. Fortunately for him, he is found by Aragorn who takes him under his wing. Few years later Harry takes part in the War of the Ring, but it turns out that the conflict was just a distraction to hide a return of Melkor. The Dark Lord is changed, even more dangerous and capable of creating life. His legions of Dark Elves are ready to conquer the world in the name of their Serpent Master.

Only Harry, who in the end turns out to be Eru's human avatar (and basically Tolkien's version of Jesus), can possibly stop him.

3) HP/GitS

The Boy Who Lived and Voldemort are nicknames of two skilled hackers that Sector 9 is trying to capture because their constant war in the deeps of the net is starting to affect the physical world. In truth they both are AI that spontaneously manifested themselves in the cyberspace.

4) HP/ASoIaF

Voldemort is reborn as King Robert's bastard son. Only there is something unusual about this world. Apparently his eternal enemy was reborn as a king's bastard too, one of the Great Bastards of King Aegon IV Targaryen, and died decades ago. Which should mean that this world is his to rule, yet nothing is as easy as he would expect.

 

I will admit that I'm not the biggest marvel reader ever, but there's a lot of argument space here for Dumbledore and Voldemort level wizards being dangerous to marvel characters. At least if you aren't making magic use physics to make things happen, there are many dangerous things that could happen magically to render people useless or make it a fair fight.

For example, the deathly hallow invisibility cloaks make you undetectable. To everything because magic, an unbreakable charm does just that, make an object unbreakable to everything. Shielding charm can block attacks regardless of source, etc. Voldemort is a man who created a spell that lets him know any time you say his name. He can possess people, is effectively immortal, and has probably one of the best understandings of magic in the series. I'm left a bit confused as to how you think that you couldn't have a story with a villain who can possess people, confuse their minds, control their minds, teleporting at will, change the material properties of an object (including in such a way as to force another effect on a person just because you have touched it), and can destroy large swathes of land with a literal flick of his wrist, silently, while potentially hidden from view by an assortment of magical stealth objects and spells.

You could reasonably write a stomp fit where Voldemort floats in the air above the mansion and conjures a block of carbon or titanium from really high up and banishes it towards the mansion at the speed of a comet and it not break any of the rules of magic as we know them in Harry Potter.

 

Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch would handle that shit.

 

From what I've seen of Dr Strange I don't see him being much more than an equivalent enemy to Voldemort than Dumbledore. I haven't seen enough Scarlet Witch stuff to say for sure how I would personally rate her against a master of magic like Voldemort or Dumbledore but her biographical descriptions don't seem to necessarily indicate that she would deal any better or worse against a teleporting, 1 hit kill spell spamming, possessing, mind reading, and mind controlling foe than anyone else.

I think people underestimate the difficulty that you would have dealing with a ruthless invisible magician with a 1 hit kill spell he may or may not be able to invoke silently. Nevermind all the rest of the shenanigans Harry Potter wizards get up to for no cost.

 

Here's an idea:

A fic showing what would happen if Elsa from Frozen found Tom Riddle's Diary.

 

Riddle could turn the planet into the Scandinavian version of Hell on Earth.

 

And it would be glorious.

 

Seeing as how I can't quote that post...

Does it have to be accidental? In fact, does it have to be Harry? And does it have to be a mystery? It just seems to me that with those schoolkids walking around with the equivalents of firearms ever since they were twelve, at least a few wouldn't be beholden to the culture of obedience and restraint, and a start flinging curses at her. I know teachers like that women would have ended up in physical confrontations in American schools, even with security guards around.

So why not have Umbridge only survive a month, before a class loses its shit, doesn't matter about which houses, curses start flying, Umbridge ends up dead. Or a poisoning attempt that is suspiciously successful. The only benefit to tracking down who did it is that Snape's instinctual action of shoving a bezoar down her throat doesn't work, and it's his 2nd guess that is right....but its too late. (He is generally thought to be blameless in her death, and a month later, is cleared of all charges and is in fact commended for his quick actions, even though they failed.) The murder and Snape's trial go by in a blur, with few, if any, in doubt of the potion master's innocence. But that leaves the problem.

All of those poisons require more than a month to make, and some require several months. They also, every single one of them, require extreme skill to brew and high connections to acquire the ingredients.

Oh shit. I wanted to make a spiel about not taking the gubmints shit and came up with a murder mystery.

And this is definitely more than ten characters.

 

Another idea I debated with myself was an AU in which Tom Marvolo Riddle is adopted at the age of one by a (loving) family with military background.

He would be taught of such things as honor, code and discipline.

 

Depends on what kind of ideas of honor and discipline. There are many and some are outright nasty. And what kinda code, morse code?

 

Military code, perhaps? Obeying orders, proper knowledge and beliefs, etc.

You know, a father with a military background could wish for his son to become a soldier in the future as well, so he'd try to steer him in that direction.

 

Which is again extremely vague and can mean an overly authoritarian outlook on life.

 

Well, yes. I'd go with an authoritarian outlook on life. We are after all talking about the military.

"Remember son, discipline!"

or

"Tom, rules are made to be obeyed, not broken. Loyalty is key."

 

If we are talking about AU Tom Riddles, how about something like this.

Grindelwald lost a duel to Dumbledore, but managed to escape and created a new base of operation in USSR. What happens next is a Wizarding version of the Cold War with Dumbledore mentoring and manipulating Tom Riddle, a troubled man who fights to not allow his inner darkness overtake him, into a person that will finally deal with his ex-friend. I would make it like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in terms of mind games and general spy work, but with magic. Probably ending it with Harry starting to work in the Department of Mysteries and Tom considering him as a candidate for his replacement, preparing to mold him into a perfect agent as he was by Dumbledore.

 

Just have his real father take him once the mother is dead, and teach him how bad it is to use magic to rape people. Raised in the manor, and then discovered to be both a wizard and the heir of Slytherin, Tom Riddle is set to succeed in both worlds.

 

Another student encounters the troll and wastes him with the Killing Curse.

 

I have one question. What will Dudley's powers be?