The many Deaths of Harry Potter is a Harry Potter Alternate Universe Fanfic in which Harry has Resurrective Immortality powers and Voldemort lacks the Villain Ball.
It can be read here
on Archive of our Own and here on fanfiction.net.
Tropes:
- Aggressive Categorism: Early on, Harry accuses most Griffindors of being bullies and when Oliver Wood contests Harry tells him to prove it. See below.
- Badass Boast: How Harry intimidates the first year Slytherin into not being hostile to him.
- Big Damn Heroes: Dumbledore arrives at the Forbidden Forest as Quirrel is about to kill Harry. However Harry still dies, but by different circumstances soon after.
- Big Fancy House: In the epilogue, Harry owns several of them all over the world, most of them under the Fidelius Charm.
- Bully Hunter: A downplayed version. Harry does not go out of his way to hunt bullies but he vows to learn magic fast enough to not only defends himself but also give payback.
- Butterfly of Doom:
- Hagrid is fired for illegally keeping a dragon, and a Death Eater is hired to replace him. Harry ends up dying and gets reset to before the firing after the Forbidden Forest detention goes south thanks to the replacement's actions.
- Harry's first run-through of Voldemort's resurrection ends when Harry transfigures soil into sodium and potassium and sets it on fire, killing himself and Voldemort in the process. The timeline then diverges after Harry is reset to the Quidditch World Cup attacks; Harry is no longer selected as champion for the Triwizard Tournament and Viktor Krum is eaten alive by a dragon.
- Chekhov's Gun: In first year, Harry buys some Peruvian instant darkness powder from the Weasley twins. He uses it in second year to infiltrate the crowd of students that shows up in the aftermath of the Basilisk attack on Mrs. Norris, thus avoiding becoming the main suspect.
- Child Prodigy: Subverted with Harry who is seen as this by students because of the time travel he learns spells faster. Hermione is a more straight version, as she masters the shield charm in a week while he took three to master.
- Combat Pragmatist: Adrian Pucey trains Harry to fight dirty.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Harry dismisses the idea that it was a coincidence that the troll just happened to track down Hermione to the girls' bathroom and believes Voldemort intended to kill her.
- Contrived Coincidence: That the troll just happened to reach the girls' bathroom. See above.
- Death by Adaptation:
- Norbert(a) the Norwegian Ridgeback dies before even hatching when Harry uses a freezing charm on her egg to kill the embryo, as Harry's last death was indirectly caused by her burning Hagrid's hut down and he doesn't have anywhere to send a dragon.
- During Harry's first run through fourth year, the Hungarian Horntail in the Triwizard Tournament suffocates on peanut butter that Harry cursed to duplicate in quantity as long as it's in contact with the dragon.
- The second run through fourth year sees a dragon get loose during the First Task and eat Viktor Krum.
- Death Is Cheap: The deaths of people who aren't Harry can be undone if he dies and is reset to before they die. However, this works best if Harry also dies as part of the same event; if he dies significantly after other people do, he tends to get reset to a point after their passing and can't change anything.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation:
- Colin Creevey dies roughly two months into his first year at Hogwarts when the Basilisk is implied to have eaten him, leaving nothing behind save for a large pool of blood and his camera. In canon, he's killed when he sneaks into the Battle of Hogwarts in his sixth year.
- While it's undone, one timeline ends when Dumbledore triggers the curse on Gaunt's ring two years early. Unlike in canon, there isn't enough time to reach Snape and have him delay the curse's effects until they can execute a Mercy Kill Arrangement, and Dumbledore succumbs to the curse.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: It seems that way for Harry, as he dies three times before he even reaches Hogwarts. Also Hogwarts itself, although intentionally.Harry: This entire school is a Death Trap, even without Voldemort. It's next to a forest filled with giant, man-eating spiders, werewolves and a host of other monsters. There's a tree on the grounds that will beat you to death if you get too close to it. The stairs move from under you so you can go falling to your death. Potions class is like a class where you make bombs without a clear idea of what you are doing.
- Exact Words: Successfully casting a Summoning Charm requires that the caster actually knows what the object they're trying to Summon is and refers to it as such; attempting to Summon a misidentified item won't work. This saves Harry's life when Voldemort tries Summoning him in Animagus form, but fails because he thinks Harry is a ferret when he's actually a mongoose.Voldemort pointed his wand and said "Accio ferret."
Harry would have grinned if his current form was physically able. He wasn't a ferret, he was a mongoose. He suspected that Voldemort had never been a to (sic) zoo in his life. - Forever War: The First Wizarding War never ended, with enough Death Eaters still remaining around to cause problems, although the conflict probably became far less vicious after Voldemort's fall.
- For Want Of A Nail: The prophecy or portions of it seem to be known to the public, as they're recorded in history books. Due to this the First Wizarding War never ended, though it probably became less violent after Voldemort's fall.
- Due to his few deaths creating a driving ambition to survive as well causing Harry to thinking before acting, he's sorted into Slytherin.
- From Bad to Worse: Without his friendship with Harry, Hagrid maintains his baby dragon which eventually sets his house on fire. This draw the attention of the teachers who find out he was illegaly keeping a dragon and he's sacked.
- Government Conspiracy: After his first death, Harry thinks that this might be at works and that his parents might have been spies.
- Hard on Soft Science: After Umbridge becomes Minister of Magic, Harry laments how a poorly taught History of Magic and the absence of political science class makes wizards and witches gullible and easy to manipulate.
- Honest John's Dealership: In the epilogue, Harry buys wrecked muggle houses, repairs them magically and sells or rents them away.
- In Spite of a Nail: Despite the multitude of changes created by Harry's paranoia about being killed, he still frees Dobby by tricking Lucius Malfoy into giving the house-elf a sock using the same method he did in canon.
- Internal Reveal: Eventually Harry does tells Dumbledore and Hermione about his powers, albeit separately and only after Hermione masters Occlumency.
- Irony: A Slytherin lecturing a Griffindor on the nature of bravery and it even gets a Lampshade Hanging.
- Kill It with Ice: To prevent his own death caused by the absence of Hagrid, Harry kills the baby dragon through casting a glacius spell on the egg.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: The attempts of the wizards and witches to wear muggle clothes is this, however they're dismissed as eccentrics.
- Magitek: In the epilogue, Harry is studying to go to college where he plans to fuse muggle science (particularly physics and chemistry) with magic to create a new branch of magic.
- The Many Deaths of You: Harry dies around a dozen times over the course of seven years, with each instance setting him back various lengths of time.
- Harry dies three times before even setting foot in Hogwarts: he has his throat slit by a Voldemort-possessed Quirrell, gets stabbed by someone claiming to act for the benefit of the dark lord, and is shoved off the Hogwarts Express by another student while the train is in motion.
- Harry's deaths in first year include getting smashed by a troll's club, being cursed into oblivion when he tries to attack Quirrel during class, and having his torso blown open by a Death Eater who got hired as a replacement groundskeeper.
- Harry only has one death each in second and third year, but they respectably involve seeing the killer gaze of the Basilisk and being caught in a crowd crush after the Dementors attack the student body during a Quidditch game.
- In fourth year, Harry dies from deliberately creating an explosion with sodium and potassium and accidentally getting decapitated by a spell used to protect Voldemort's ring Horcrux.
- Mythology Gag:
- During the Opening Feast after the sorting, Harry wonders that if wizards have trolls in their toilets or snakes in the drains if Hogwarts, with a forbidden forest and mysterious danger in the third, is considered the safest place in the wizarding world.
- Draco Malfoy's Patronus takes the form of a ferret, referencing how he was Transfigured into one during fourth year in canon.
- No OSHA Compliance: Hogwart's moving stairs, from which Harry is thrown out from in a failed attempted murder. Also in second year, Harry fears briefly that he might have killed someone when using the instant darkness powder.
- Pædo Hunt: A major contributing factor to Sirius being declared innocent is that many of the jurors are disgusted by Peter Pettigrew sleeping in the same bed with several adolescent Weasleys (albeit not actually in the sexual sense of the word and while in rat form).
- Pragmatic Hero: Harry. While reticent to use lethal means against humans, he has no problems with fighting dirty and using underhanded tactics.
- A perfect example was his final confrontation with Quirrel in which he snaped his wand and then cast two cutting spells to wake up Fluffy so it attacks the defenseless Quirrel.
- Pragmatic Villainy:
- Having learned the hard way that attempting to use the Killing Curse on Harry will only make it backfire on him, Voldemort directs his followers to cut Harry's throat with a knife.
- Unlike canon, Voldemort rejects the Only I Can Kill Him mentality and puts a bounty on his head.
- Properly Paranoid: Harry, who refuses to playing snowballs for fear someone will a put a rock in one to hurt him.
- Resurrective Immortality: Harry, although this power works through some form of time travel, although how much he travels is unconstant. The first time he died, Harry went back in time a day but the second time he went back two weeks.
- Shout-Out: To the The Arithmancer, as Harry takes Arithmancy in third year which at advanced levels allow for spell creation.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Gilderoy Lockhart does not end up mind wiped, though he's still fire due to having a sexual relationship with a student.
- Stuff Blowing Up:
- Harry kills himself and Voldemort in the graveyard by transfiguring the soil into sodium and potassium. But the trope is Played for Drama as it sets off a Butterfly of Doom.
- During the Battle of Ministry, Harry kills dozens of Death Eater in a single strike by using potassium and conjured birds.
- Teacher/Student Romance: Lockhart is fired at the end of Harry's second year after word gets out that he's in a sexual relationship with a fifth year girl, which leads to an investigation that brings the extent of his other lies to light.
- Teach Me How To Fight: Knowing he's outmatched, Harry makes a bargain with Oliver Wood and Adrian Pucey to teach him how to fight. When the timeline resets, the Butterfly of Doom results in only Adrian becoming his teacher.
- They Would Cut You Up: Harry fears this is what the Unspeakables would do to him if anyone learned of his abilities.
- Time Travel: How Harry's self-resurrection works. The amount of time that he goes back also increases with each death, resulting in Harry being mentally older.
- Tyrant Takes the Helm: Dolores Umbridge becomes the Minister of Magic after Scrimeour is killed in an explosion.
- Unfortunate Names: Upon meeting Neville Longbottom for the first time, Harry immediately thinks that unless other Wizarding surnames are similarly bizarre, Neville's surname likely makes him a bully magnet.With a name like Longbottom, Harry suspected that (Neville) had to have been bullied, unless other wizard names were just as outlandish.
- Villain Ball: Subverted with Voldemort, who puts a bounty on Harry and thus avoids the Only I Can Kill Him stance in canon. The bounty forces Harry to develop various disguises, both magical and mundane, to go unnoticed.
- Worth It: Harry's opinion after throwing a Stinging Hex three times at a bully's face.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: Harry strikes up a friendship with Colin Creevey, who was sorted Slytherin here, but he disappears in a Basilisk attack and is never seen again. Worse yet, Harry is unable to save him because his next revival places him nearly a month after Colin's death.
