Fanfic / Dodging Prison & Stealing Witches

He'd been shipped off to Azkaban screaming for someone, anyone, to believe him.
No one did.

— Harry's life so far

"Dodging Prison & Stealing Witches" on its own website, here on FF.net and here on AO3 is a Harry Potter fanfic written by LeadVonE.

Harry Potter has been banged up for ten years in the hellhole brig of Azkaban for a crime he didn't commit, and his traitorous brother, the not-really-boy-who-lived, has royally messed things up. After meeting Fate and Death, Harry is given a second chance to travel to the past, squash Voldemort, dodge a thousand years in prison, and snatch everything his hated brother holds dear.

The fanfic is ongoing and comprised of multiple books, with an expected total of 8 books.

The Dodging Prison & Stealing Witches book series

1. Revenge is Best Served Raw
2. The Foundations of Power
3. Nature Red in Cloak and Dagger

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Dodging Prison & Stealing Witches Tropes:

• Abusive Parents: Harry's relatives starved and beat Harry before Hogwarts.
• All Just a Dream: Ginny wears a necklace which Harry uses to control her dreams. He gradually wins her over by showing her the truth about John Potter, and things like her funeral from the second timeline, and how he was sent back in time to prevent it. He spends months winning her over without even meeting her in person. They later use the necklace to train while they're apart. It's so realistic that Harry frequently has to remind Ginny that it's All Just a Dream.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: All purebloods want to keep their status quo, no matter the cost.
• Arms Dealer: In later parts of the story Harry deals with arms to earn money.
• Arranged Marriage: Due to the political situation arranged marriages are an important part of the society.
• Ascended Fanboy: Alexandra Black. She’s desperate to learn more about Lord Slytherin then finally gets to join Harry’s inner circle after he puts her through the wringer of a duel, where he scares her a lot by his magical power and usage of Fiendfyre. When she realizes that Harry is Lord Slytherin, she feels pretty stupid for ignoring the opportunities he’d already given her to train with him.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Lucius Malfoy is a retired duelist who can learn a great deal about someone from their casting and dueling techniques. After seeing Lord Slytherin duel once, he realizes the man fights exactly the same way Voldemort does. After the dueling tournament, he notes the same of Harry Potter, causing him to believe both are people who were taken over by one of Voldemort's horcruxes. He's wrong but literally the only other person to figure either out was Voldemort after spending months observing Harry.
• Back Story: We learn about every character's history.
• Badass Bookworm: Hermione does badass stuff like standing toe to toe with Dumbledore.
• Badass Crew: Harry's team is extremely good at what they are doing.
• Balance of Power: Gray vs Light vs Dark is balanced.
• Being Good Sucks: Dumbledore frequently thinks this, which is ironic since he always thinks this after doing something evil.
• Beware the Honest Ones: Tonks messes up one of Dumbledore's plans to frame Harry because she refuses to give in to The Needs of the Many, stating that you should fight for what's best for everyone equally rather than sacrifice the one to save the many.
• Burning with Anger: Harry radiates magic when he is angry in public.
• Cain and Abel: John and Harry fight each other all the time.
• Call-Back: LeadVonE never forgets any story elements.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: Alex answers to her father with Lord Black when he uses his authority.
  • Justified every time Harry Potter as Lord Slytherin talks to James and Lily Potter.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Happens when Lord Slytherin talks to Lily during the job interview and he calls her out on her treatment of Harry.
• Came Back Strong: Harry and John had an immense power boost after the time travel.
• Carry a Big Stick: The Smith family is seen walking with war hammers, even their children.
• Cat Girl: Ginny is a cheetah animagus which reflects on her human behaviour.
• The Chessmaster: Many characters in the story aspire to this. Some worthy of note.
  • Dumbledore thinks he is this, although his plots usually fail because of his arrogance.
  • Voldemort hasn’t had much of a chance to prove it yet, although he did outmaneuver Harry at the end of year 1.
  • Harry absolutely. That’s half the fun of the story.
  • Mister Bentley, bureaucrat extraordinaire, is as of yet unproven.
• Childhood Marriage Promise: Daphne and Luna were both betrothed to Harry while they were kids.
• Child Prodigy: Harry and John are insanely strong as children, going toe to toe with seventh-year students, ranging from 17-18 years old.
• Child Soldiers: All of the children in Harry's inner circle are combat ready, and constantly training. Although it’s worth noting that Harry isn’t planning on them needing to fight for some years to come.
• Combat Clairvoyance: With the ability to sense magic you can anticipate your enemies move.
• Cool Train: The Hogwarts Express. The three political factions divvy it up into Dark, Light, and Gray territories.
• Costumes Change Your Size: Whenever Harry dons the Lord Slytherin persona he takes an ageing potion to grow to the size of an adult.
• Cursed with Awesome: With the horcrux in his head Harry managed to learn all of the magic that Voldemort knew, and a ton of other stuff besides. Unfortunately, that meant witnessing the many ways Voldemort used that knowledge...
• Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: Harry is a criminal and does not hide it from his girls.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Dark magic or people affiliated with the Dark side, do not all do dark things.
• Dark Action Girl: Alexandra uses Necromancy to fight.
• A Day in the Limelight: We learn of Clare Cooper, a minor character, who has an entire chapter dedicated to her.
• Deadly Environment Prison: Azkaban with soul-sucking Dementors.
• Death Glare: After Ginny drank the hate potion. Both times, although the second time the target is the person who slips her the potion against her will. They also get a slap.
• Debut Queue: A lot of characters where introduced in successive chapters.
• Defeat Means Friendship: After Harry defeated Alexandra in their duel, she joins his inner circle. Harry also fights with Jacob Greengrass the first time they meet.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • As she finally figures out how to switch places with objects, Ginny unthinkingly casts the spell only to realize a moment too late she's about to switch places with an egg on a shelf in a muggle store.
  • Dumbledore planting a book on dark magic as part of his attempt to frame Harry for murder fails because the defense notes the publication number states it was printed less than three weeks before Harry allegedly wandlessly cast a spell in the book. According to an expert, learning to cast a spell wandlessly in six weeks is an impressive time, with ten weeks being average; it's outright impossible to manage in the time between when the book was printed and when Harry allegedly cast the spell.
• Door Stopper: The series is starting to become one, as it has just started on book 3 from 8 and is already (March 2018) at 428,438 (according to AO3) or 439,662 (according to FF.net) words.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Daphne was referenced early, then later joined the harem.
• Emancipated Child: Harry is emancipated because of his Lord Slytherin status, yet only a few people know about this.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • John suffer from this twofold. First, when he's given a second chance to defeat Voldemort, John believes he's in a "Groundhog Day" Loop so when he can't win, willingly walks to his death, not knowing he was only given one second chance. Next, when John "awakens" to the timeline, he has memories of the first timeline and thinks he's in the second. In reality, he failed and is in the third timeline where Harry was sent back. He learns something's wrong when Ginny hates him and his parents talk about a mysterious Lord Slytherin.
  • Having observed Harry all year, Voldemort realizes that Harry has his memories. Since long distance time travel is thought to be impossible, he comes to the reasonable conclusion that Harry somehow absorbed the soul fragment in his scar. Likewise Lucius Malfoy, whose time as a professional duelist has given him the ability to tell a lot about a person by analyzing their casting and dueling techniques, figures out that both Lord Slytherin and Harry Potter duel like Voldemort does and assumes they're new incarnations of him from other horcruxes.
• The Epic: It gets longer and longer and longer.
• Equivalent Exchange: A lot of the magical power-ups in the story are gained through rituals, which require a sacrifice proportionate to the power you gain from it. For example, a ritual to give Alexandra Black the physical strength she'd have if she were a boy cost her ability to taste sweetness.
• Evil Versus Evil: Everybody does questionable things in the story. It is only important to not get caught.
• False Utopia: Muggleborn children think they are joining an awesome world, only to be treated as third class citizens.
• Fate Worse than Death: Harry wants John to suffer.
• Fiery Redhead: Ginny Weasley.
• Fighting Fingerprint: Harry Potter and Lord Slythering both duel identically to Voldemort, causing Lucius to "discover" that both are new incarnations of the dark wizard via horcruxes.
• Flashback: When Ginny tried to kill Virgo.
• Foreshadowing: There is a lot of it.
• Frame-Up: After the dueling tournament when Dumbledore tries to frame Harry for attempted murder
• A Friend in Need: When Harry was in detention, but his girls needed assistance.
• From Bad to Worse: When Harry finally managed to get his hands on the philosopher's stone, everything suddenly went horribly wrong.
• Good Is Not Soft: Harry's group can be pretty brutal. This is mostly a consequence of the hell that was Harry’s life before he went back in time, not necessarily the natural disposition of his friends.
• Government Conspiracy: It turns out that the topic of Divination is mostly useless because it was deemed too dangerous to be allowed as common knowledge and the International Confederation of Wizards actively wiped its more useful spells from the minds and textbooks of the magical populations of the world. They even went so far as to enchant sentient Portraits to make them unable to share their knowledge of Divination as it used to be known.
• Guns Are Worthless: Can be stopped by magical shields.
• Hard-Work Montage: Ginny had a training montage.
• Harem Genre: Harry Potter is working towards a harem ending with multiple witches.
• Heir Club for Men: There can be a female heiress, but the male husband will always control everything.
• Hero Antagonist: Dumbledore is seen as the leader of the Light, but goes a lot of ways to keep the status quo in-tact.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: A lot of characters like Remus Lupin, Alex's mother still haven’t appeared in the story yet. Just why that is is unclear.
• Human Sacrifice: The Unforgivable Ritual which gives the user a massive power boost but has two distinct costs. First, it requires completely dedicating yourself to a cause of your choosing and you become somewhat obsessed with it. Second, and more dire, the ritual requires you to kill your True Love.
• Ignored Enemy: After they discover that the muggleborn girl inside Virgo is still alive, Harry and company decide to handle Virgo later.
• Implausible Synchrony: Invoked by Daphne, Hermione, Alex, Ginny, and Luna during the climax of the Basilisk arc. At nine o'clock on the day of the Dueling Tournament, all five synchronize their pocket watches so they can accurately keep track of time. This is important because they are parting ways and each has her own tasks to execute, with most of them depending on the Tournament's schedule.
• Info Drop: Small things can have very important meanings.
• Invisibility: Disillusionment charm and the invisibility cloak used all the time.
• Involuntary Group Split: First Halloween event.
• I Kiss Your Hand: Hand kissing happens throughout the series.
• I Will Wait for You: Angelystor waited for Harry.
• Jaw Drop: Constantly.
• Lawful Stupid: Emphasis on stupid with Percy Weasley when he tries to insist Ginny having a developed mindscape was dark magic. When his father insists it isn't dark magic, merely unusual, Percy retorts that all new magic is dark by ministry law until it's been analyzed. But as Arthur points out, mindscapes and occlumency aren't new. In fact, they're centuries old. It's just that the Weasleys have never taught their children occlumency.
• Let Me at Him!: Ginny Weasley to John Potter. She’s furious at him for stealing her broom and convincing her parents that she is being mind-controlled. Although she is restrained on her bed at the time, she manages to get in a wandless stinging hex to his face, which John mistakes for accidental magic. He does still realize that she is dangerous to be around though, beating a hasty retreat.
• Light Is Not Good: Albus Dumbledore, as the Leader of the Light, and James Potter, the spokesperson of the Light, do very questionable things.
• A Lesson in Defeat: Harry teaches Alexandra just why her plan to take a beating is dumb. By giving her one.
• Lost Technology: Divination.
• Loves Only Gold: Ironically subverted. The goblins state in various chapters that gold is ultimately worthless to them. This is probably at least in part due to the fact that they have a philosopher’s stone of their own. Instead what they most desire are the mysterious ghost gems.
• Loyalty Mission: Harry had to fight and defeat Alex to make her loyal towards Harry.
• MacGuffin: The philosopher's stone. Also, the mysterious ghost gem.
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • Dumbledore manipulates a lot of different events in the story. He justifies it with the usual “Greater Good” nonsense.
  • Technically, Harry fits this too. But the girls love him anyway, as shown when Ginny is tricked into drinking a hate potion keyed to Harry that magically points out his faults and worst attributes. She calls him this, then admits that she already knew it about him and didn’t care.
• Masquerading As the Unseen: Different ruses have been used so that no one would suspect Harry being Lord Slytherin.
• May–December Romance: Daphne nearly had to marry a really old wizard.
• Meaningful Name: A lot of names are used in the context. Most notably the goblin names.
• Might Makes Right: The stronger always dictate the course.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: After being made 22 for a night, Hermione no longer has the hormones that affected her thoughts so much but still remembers her very physical attraction to Harry.
• The Mole: Alex pretends to side with the Dark.
• Muggles Do It Better: When it comes to runes, muggles are far superior because while one can only carve runes so small by hand and still be accurate, a machine can carve them small enough to need a magnifying glass to see and still be completely accurate. Several projects involving runes had previously been considered impossible/impractical because no one could carve them small enough.
• My God, What Have I Done?: More "My God, What Did I Do?"; when Hermione learns that she was one of Harry's few friends in the last timeline until she eventually gave into peer pressure and accepted the idea that he was the villain everyone else said he was, she destroys every other declaration of intent gift she'd received and spends the next few hours sobbing as she assures Harry that she'd never do that to him.
• Necromancer: Alexandra specializes in it.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: It is indicated that Luna might become a T-rex animagus.
• Nobody Poops: The trunks with which Harry apparates everywhere have no toilets. He frequently ferries his harem/inner circle around in those trunks.
• Noodle Incident: When Ginny and Luna switch places so Ginny can buy more high-quality clothing, Luna says she did something to Ginny's brothers that might make them worship her. We never learn what.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Averted when John falls off his broom. He's hit by almost 200 spells to slow or stop his fall and the sudden deceleration breaks almost every bone in his body, though this was fully intentional on the part of his twin Harry and Harry's friends.
• One Degree of Separation: Because Magical Britain has a relatively small population, everybody knows everybody. This is especially awkward when you consider that this must include Death Eaters, but there’s not much that people can do about it at this point.
• Original Character: John Potter, Alexandra Black, Julia Olsson, Clare Cooper and Virgo Malfoy didn't exist in the Harry Potter novels.
• Out-Gambitted: Dumbledore frames Harry for attempted murder of his twin John and convinces the boys' parents to let him defend Harry at trial, intending to lock Harry up in Azkaban until he has to face Voldemort. Unfortunately, not only does Harry refuse to sign a confession, but the prosecution informs him they plan to push for execution. Come the trial, Dumbledore learns that not only is the prosecution pushing for exoneration, but a good deal of evidence he thought was inadmissible is presented. Due to the prosecution insisting the defendant is innocent and the defense declaring him guilty, Amelia forces the two to switch sides.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Both Ginny and Alexandra are far more skilled than most adult wizards at wandless casting despite only being teens. However, they're both outshined by Luna who's not only more powerful and a quick learner (such as figuring out Harry's spell-swatting in a single day without instruction), but is also remarkably innovative, as demonstrated by firing a spell from her tongue. It's especially notable for Ginny who never once beat Luna in a duel but in her first duel against Alexandra, her opening salvo designed to buy her time to take cover takes out the other girl immediately.
• Parental Abandonment: The Potter parents abandoned Harry.
• Polar Opposite Twins: Harry & John, as well as Padma & Parvati, are polar opposites.
• The Poorly Chosen One: John Potter twice over:
  • First, Dumbledore makes him the replacement boy-who-lived in order to keep Harry down out of paranoia. This results in Voldemort winning.
  • Then, since John is fighting Voldemort anyway, Death and Fate decide to send him back in time and give him a second chance to fulfill the prophecy that was never about him in the first place. He still fails despite a four year head start.
• Prison Episode: When Harry is in the ministry holding cells.
• Properly Paranoid: Harry Potter has a habit of checking if anyone is listening in to his conversations with Hermione and Daphne by having one of them speak a secret covered by the Fidelius Charm that he's the Secret-Keeper of. If anyone is around who doesn't know the secret, they'll choke when they try to talk. So far the group has found a spying house elf and Daphne realized Hermione was an imposter with this method.
• Rags to Royalty: Harry begins the story as a literal pile of rags in the corner of his cell. That is the same chapter where Fate and Death conspire to give him a Lordship in the Wizengamot. Rags to royalty indeed.
  • Harry also frequently wears cheaper, more common, garb in order to avoid suspicion or get his opponents to lower their guards, such as during the dueling tournament.
• Red Baron: Sirius Black is known as the 'Hammer of the Light'.
• Rescue Arc: Getting Harry out of prison.
• The Reveal: Harry reveals himself several times as Lord Slytherin in this story.
• Rewatch Bonus: A lot of backtracking.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Once it's revealed that Harry is the 'true' Potter Heir, Virgo correctly deduces that this is due to him also having been sent back through time, but assumes that he came back after joining Voldemort and willingly merging with the horcrux within him rather than going back through a deal with Fate to oppose Voldemort.
• Secret Identity: Harry is moonlighting as Lord Slytherin. Although it might be more accurate to say that Lord Slytherin is moonlighting as Harry...
• Secret Art: Divination and Necromancy.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The main premise of the story.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: After several convoluted plans involving multiple fidelius charms, polyjuice, and learning the lost art of scrying to steal the Philosopher's Stone, Harry learns it's a fake from a prerecorded message triggered by the stone moving too far from the Mirror of Erised.
• Shapeshifting: Animagus training.
• Story Arc: Arcs with different topics like getting the stone or changing the book of names, saving Ginny etc.
• Suppressed History: True Divination is gone.
• Take That!: The story contains a dig against Peggy Sue stories where the hero tries to preserve the timeline so they can rely on their knowledge of the future. Death and Fate note that when they sent Harry's twin brother John back in time to fix things, he did it all wrong by trying to preserve the timeline despite needing to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. When they send Harry back (because despite what John thought, they only give a single second chance to anyone), they insist Harry use every advantage he possibly can as soon as he possibly can.
• Tautological Templar: Dumbledore is this, but thinks that he’s the Pragmatic Hero.
  • This becomes especially clear when he’s trying to frame Harry for a crime. He calls Tonks in to enlist her help as a metamorphmagus, but before he says anything incriminating he tries to feel out her moral flexibility. He’s taken a bit by surprise when she turns out to be The Idealist and tells him she wouldn’t do something evil for a good cause. In this case, she acted as a Morality Chain and for the sake of his PR (Villain with Good Publicity) Dumbledore has no choice but to give up on that option.
• Too Dumb to Live: John does very questionable things, harming himself a lot. Like the quidditch match or the troll fight.
  • More impressively, in the second timeline, he allowed Voldemort to kill him because he assumed that Death and Fate would give him a third chance to get things right, and presumably even more. They’re so annoyed by this that they send Harry back instead.
  • After the troll on Halloween is crippled and barely dragging itself along the ground, John leaps at it and casts a blasting spell at point blank range. Not only was it completely unnecessary but he's badly injured as a result. The girls who crippled the troll consider it the stupidest thing they ever saw.
  • Upon coming across a necromantic ritual site, John starts casting in an attempt to destroy it. Doing so revives the Whomping Willow inferius there which nearly kills him, Neville, Draco, and Theodore Nott. Afterwards Draco tells him that introducing new magic to a ritual is literally the last thing you should do.
  • Daphne insists Hermione come with her to heal a dying unicorn despite them both knowing it's being hunted by Voldemort and using a Sense Danger spell that tells them they're currently in mortal peril. After they (barely) escape, Harry lectures them for risking their lives over a unicorn. Unlike the troll on Halloween, where they faced a dangerous but manageable threat to save a classmate, here they faced the most dangerous dark wizard alive to save an animal.
• Tournament Arc: The duelling tournament.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Harry really likes oranges, as seen throughout the story. In fact he likes them so much, the Hogwarts Wards list him as orange flavored synaesthetically.
• Training the Gift of Magic: Needs to be trained constantly.
• Translation Convention: While viewing a memory of an event over 1,500 years ago, Hermione explains to her friends that it's a memory of a memory of a memory etc. due to language barriers. 1,500 years ago, nothing resembling modern English existed. Every hundred years someone has to view the memory, translate it into the modern vernacular, and make a copy of their memory of doing so. As a result, the memory has several people lined up along the walls reading translations of what's being spoken in the memory.
• Trauma Button: Harry remembers the ten years he spent in Azkaban when he is in a situation where he feels trapped.
• Troperiffic: Uses every trope possible.
• Unexpectedly Dark Episode: Clare Cooper's chapter is pretty dark.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Dumbledore does everything humanly possible to keep up the flawed status quo.
• Victory Pose: After Alexandra managed to do something, she did a victory dance.
• Violence is the Only Option: Multiple times throughout the story disagreements and other conflicts are handled through a duel.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Due to over a decade in Azkaban in the previous timeline, Harry is terrified of being locked up. Any time he's "trapped", he starts immediately panicking and at one point destroys an entire classroom during a meltdown. This is especially problematic as Harry doesn't always think things through and ends up in ambushes where he needs to think clearly but can't.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Daphne is having important meetings for Lord Slytherin in his name (contract negotiating for the Nimbus) and Hermione managed to fool an entire room of wizards that she was a twenty-something witch. Most of the Noble children are portrayed like this when they play politics at the age of eleven.
  • Justified in that all of them practice Occlumency, a magic that helps them control their emotions and organize their thoughts and memories. It even makes learning easier.

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