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felixoffelicis · 5 years

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Intro to Bite (HPfic)<pending>

A/N Im posting this here cause its not letting me send it to my friend through PM. This is just the intro of what im currently working on, and if I end up posting it ill do so on my wp account @Falling_Snow.

The event that changed everything for me had been simple and unimportant, something that I'd forgotten about a couple days after it happened. It wasn't violent or fear-inducing. There was no struggle or cry for help, and the act itself had only taken a split-second of my time when it happened. However, that one event would create a personalised hell that I'd never be able to escape no matter how hard I tried or how hard I tried to kill myself. An innocent action that spawned the blessing I considered to be the curse of Death himself.

Looking at the beetle that was the size of my closed fist, it was hard to think that the thing could ever hurt me, despite my father's strong statement that I shouldn't play with anything he brought home from his work at the Ministry. Not heeding his warnings, I had done so anyway. I was only ten, and of all the things my father brought home to work on, a beetle seemed like an innocent thing to inspect.

I'd been naive when I'd thought that the beetle was completely harmless, and when it had bitten my arm I had simply been annoyed rather than in pain or anything of the sort. I'd just put the beetle back in its cage as retaliation and gone on with my life, forgetting it had ever even happened.

There'd been no sudden fever or burst of unimaginable pain, no superpowers like the muggle comics, no evidence that anything had changed. It left no mark to my skin despite breaking the surface, and my child-self was content with putting a plaster over it and forgetting the whole thing.

I grew up.

I finished my magical education at Durmstrang and made lots of friends before my family decided it was best to move to Muggle London for my father's job at the Department of Mysteries. I met a muggle girl there named Kristen and pretty soon I found myself telling her about the magic world, asking her to marry me only a few days later when she accepted me wholeheartedly.

I became an Auror at the Ministry of Magic and after finding a natural talent for the detective work behind Magical crime I was promoted to Detective, and soon after that, Head Detective. All the while, Kristen cared for our two children, Rosealine May Skokvist and William Quinn Skokvist, one of muggle blood and one of wizard blood, both loved dearly despite their differences.

I solved crimes at the Ministry and watched my children grow into kind and talented adults. I walked my daughter down the aisle when she married a muggle tailor in London, and I was there when my son became a Potions Master and received his certification at the Ministry. I was infinitely proud of them both and cried when I held my grandson for the first time in a muggle hospital room.

However, it wasn't long after that I returned to that same hospital with Kristen, where a doctor told us she was very sick and wouldn't last for much longer.

I took her to every Healer at St. Mungos I could, but they could do nothing for her. I was holding her hand firmly in my grasp when she passed, becoming numb to my surroundings as the funeral was planned by my son and daughter, both of which who constantly were at my side through everything.

I buried myself in my work then, choosing to be productive rather than wallow in my sorrow. Kristen wouldn't have wanted me to stop my life just because she was gone and I was determined to live the best life I could for her until I could see her again in the afterlife.

Yet, I became reckless and flippant with my life after that, taking on more dangerous cases that my coworkers advised me not to pursue. Which is how I ended up in a duel in an alleyway in Manchester, swapping spells with a much younger and stronger wizard than myself. No matter how much I trained to become an Auror, there was still nothing I could do when I saw a green spell flying towards me in what felt like slow motion.

I thought of my kids and how they were going to take the news of my death. I thought of my 6-year-old grandson whose birthday was coming up in 3 months. I thought of Kristen holding my hand that night she left. I thought of all the things I'd never gotten to do and the people I'd never made amends with. I thought of how incomplete I was leaving things.

But that killing curse never hit me.

Instead, time itself seemed to stop completely and I was left staring at the curse that was inches from my chest.

Then, slowly, time resumed, but it didn't resume forwards. As images flashed in front of my face at a speed that I couldn't even register, I began to realise that this was it, this was what death was like.

This was my life flashing before my eyes, and soon there'd be a white light that would lead to the afterlife or maybe even just a void of nothing, whatever was there I was about to find out.

The white light came soon enough, exactly as how it was described in books and muggle films, blinding me to a point where I had to blink a few times to adjust my eyes. But when I opened my eyes and registered the image I was seeing, I couldn't quite comprehend what was in front of me. It seemed completely impossible.

I was on the back porch of my childhood home in Sweden, with a light summer breeze gently brushing my semi-long hair away from my face in a way that baffled me even further. I hadn't had my hair this long since I was a child, and with my current surroundings, I wasn't sure what to expect next.

Was this the afterlife?

As I took in my surroundings once more and registered what was in front of me, I felt my breath catch in my throat, because there, on my hand, it's tiny little fangs having just left my skin, was that beetle that had bitten me so many years ago.

The golden pattern on it's back shimmered in the sunlight of the early afternoon, exactly the way I remembered it to when I'd been a kid.

I sat there for a moment, not noticing or caring as the beetle scuttled off beneath the old boards of the porch, leaving me in stunned silence.

Here I was, a ten-year-old boy again and there were no signs of Death lurking around the corner, come to take me to the afterlife I was supposed to be at right now. Was this really the afterlife? Was I dead? It all felt real, and as my mother called me to come inside for lunch I wasn't sure what my next step should be.

The beetle I'd been bitten by was a scarabaeus tempus, a beetle used in the creation of time turners once they were crushed up, and a beetle I knew shouldn't have done anything to me with a bite. I'd heard my father talk about the beetles countless times for his work, and never once had he mentioned the possibility of what I was currently experiencing; albeit, nobody would know until it came to their death. But even then-- I should have died, there should've been-- Why was I here? Why--? None of this made any sense.

I looked down at the small barely visible mark that the beetle had caused, the wound hardly bleeding at all and easily explained as a simple bug bite once I'd wiped away the blood. I knew I still had to be in some form of shock, wondering if this was Death's idea of a joke, and if it was then I wanted him to know I didn't find it funny.

Somehow, I was stuck in a giant time loop.

I'd lost my life, my kids were gone, my job was probably still occupied by that bigot Riley Morris who had it before me, and there was the possibility that even if I killed myself right now I'd just return right back to the moment after I'd been bitten by that beetle.

After a few minutes of truly processing this, I realised I was crying, and even when I noticed it I didn't stop. I had just lost and gained my entire world, and now I didn't know what to do with it.

It was all gone.

My life had completely been swept clean and given back to me anew.

My parents were alive here, my wife was out there somewhere, and I was easily the most skilled Detective the Ministry had ever had and it would be easy to retake my position.

But did I want to?

Kristen wouldn't know who I was, I'd already solved every case that would now be presented to me, and the children I might have with Kristen in this life might be completely different than Rosaline and William. Could I live with myself, knowing that I knew everything about them and they knew nothing of me? If I went to go find my wife 10 years from now would she call me a stalker for knowing so much?

What was I supposed to do now?

Did I continue living what I had before all over again, or did I live something else?

I hadn't even gotten my Durmstrang letter yet, and I wasn't even entirely sure I wanted to receive it after already knowing so much magic. I'd be light years ahead of any first-year student.

My second run through the loop, I disappeared.

Using ageing potions to make myself appear older than I was, I immigrated to France, working small jobs and reading up on anything and everything to do with time magic. Eventually, I became well-known in my field under a pen name where I published much of my research, still not coming close to the reason why I was here.

I still mourned the children that were never born in this time loop, but I stayed away from Kristen, only ever finding her a year before I knew her cancer would grow worse and giving her a letter stripped of anything that authorities could trace back to me. I knew I wouldn't have the strength to face her myself. After all, in a life where she never met me, she already had another at her side when I set the letter on her doorstep.

At first, it hurt to know that the Kristen of this time had someone else, but I had to remind myself that this wouldn't be my Kristen, and she never would be. It was lonely, but I spent that time doing things I'd always wanted to do instead of wallowing in self-pity for myself.

I invested in muggle products I knew would get big in the future thanks to my knowledge of it and spent a lot of my time in muggle casinos and fancy hotels, not ever truly enjoying the cash when I knew all it took was one trip down the stairs to take it away and set me back to where I was on that porch. Yet, there was still that conflicted hopefulness in whether or not I'd die or not.

As the years dragged on and my 77th birthday passed by without a killing curse aimed at my chest, I began to seek more purpose, investing myself to politics and working my way through position after position until I was elected into being France's Minister of Magic at 79.

I carried the position with pride and found real purpose in it, doing everything in my power to bring the French magical community times of peace and valuable change for the better. I tore down prejudiced laws and allowed my people more freedom, doing my best to form a personal connection with those who I led.

However, I retired soon after my 90th birthday, spending the rest of my life in a forest cottage in the French hills, taking up a hobby for woodcraft and constructing furniture before I "died" at 128, my body going through the reversal process again as my second life in the time loop flashed before my eyes.

Once again I was on that back porch.

The third life I knew what I was doing and didn't waste time. I went directly to my father and told him what had happened to me, forcing him to understand just how dire this situation was, and he listened, even though his ten-year-old son seemed to have just lost his mind.

We worked day and night on trying to understand what was wrong with me, the prior knowledge I had from my second run through the loop still cemented in my brain even though I hadn't been able to take it with me. I didn't have any of my notes or research, but I still had enough new information for my father to patch together things in his own research at the Department of Mysteries.

But no answer made itself known.

I began to study genetic magic, making groundbreaking discoveries at the age of 14 that I kept to myself to avoid major outrage. The Muggles were close enough to making designer babies, I didn't need witches and wizards getting their hands on the same ideas.

The only answers I could find in my new field of study led to more and more questions, seeing as whatever the beetle had done to me must've changed not my magic, but the codons of my DNA in a way that I wasn't even sure was fixable.

I experimented on mice, and other creatures before trying to remove the gene from my body and was met with excruciating pain that felt like how I'd imagine a crucio felt, my hearting feeling as though it stopped in my chest.

And then time reversed itself and I was opening my eyes to the view from my back porch, the distant lake and trees of the Swedish landscape greeting me back from my 4-year trip.

I tried again.

And again.

I tried so many times I lost count, restarting over and over again until I eventually threw a bombarda directly beneath my feet, effectively blowing everything up for about half a second before I was once again reversed in the loop, staring at the beetle there with frustrated tears in my eyes.

It was difficult, and I spent a long time lying on that porch trying to accept the situation I was in, but I told myself I was okay with this, and that I could make this a gift.

It was only a curse if I let it be.

Life after life I kept pushing through, knowing I'd only end up back on the back porch if I gave up, and I was really starting to hate that place despite its beautiful scenery.

I avoided those I met in past lives.

I set goals for myself at the beginning of each life.

I experimented in blood magic and made myself a time-free home inside a trunk, similar to that of Newt Scamander's briefcase. Although, mine was a bit bigger.

I ruled countries, magic and muggle.

I raced cars on Japan's mountain roads.

I owned all of Canada at one point.

I invented an unimaginable amount of useless kitchen tools.

I invented spells people couldn't even dream of.

I trained dragons in Romania.

But I still couldn't escape.

However, the 12th loop through time I found myself attending a magic school in Africa as a transfer student, revelling in the home away from home feeling that these old buildings seemed to give off. I became the Headmaster by 43 and started my new quest of wanting to be the Headmaster of every magic school, with my eyes set on Hogwarts the next time the time loop reversed itself and deposited me on the back porch once more.

Little did I know that the 13th loop in time was where my story would truly begin anew.

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