Fanfic / Intercession

She was pretty sure she was going to appreciate being drugged for this conversation in retrospect, because at the moment she felt pretty good about how things were turning out, and that was probably going to be a rare feeling when she was lucid.

Intercession is a Harry Potter/Worm Crossover fanfiction, posted and completed on Archive of Our Own by VigoGrimborne.

After the events of Worm, Taylor is taken by Contessa to another world, where she is promised, "No powers, no entities, no knowledge that either ever existed. I am going to leave you here, and no parahuman will ever return to this dimension." And, as part of the Path, Taylor is given baby Harry to raise, taken from the Dursleys' doorstep and with all appropriate paperwork forged to make Taylor his mother. Until, years later, she discovers that this world is not quite as mundane as she was led to believe...

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This story contains examples of:

• Adaptational Relationship Change: Being "Harry Hebert who looks like Harry Potter but says he isn't" leads to a number of changes to Harry's friendships.
  • He and Ron start off on the wrong foot when Ron insists he must be Harry Potter, and Harry finds him annoying. They don't really interact much after they're sorted to different houses.
  • He's actually closer to Hermione than in canon, since she's more accepting of his claims, apologetic about the mix-up, and they have more in common since Harry was raised as muggle-born.
  • Draco Malfoy doesn't take much interest in Harry, and is just slightly unpleasant from a distance. However, Ron steps up as Draco's rival/nemesis.
  • Ginny doesn't become tongue-tied and shy around him, and is actually the first Weasley he gets to know well.
  • Rather than wanting to hear about Lily and James Potter, Harry has very little interest in his supposed parents and even starts to resent them since people keep shoving them down his throat at the expense of his actual living mother.
• Adaptational Upbringing Change: Taylor, transported to the Harry Potter world, takes baby Harry in and raises him as her son instead of his uncaring aunt and uncle. Harry grows up with a loving mother, becomes more self-assured and questions authority like Taylor, makes different friends, and is less interested in his birth parents compared to canon.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Molly Weasley casually drops she doesn't think Muggles can be proper parents to a magic child, in front of the extremely mundane Grangers who obviously dislike the hint. Taylor notes Molly's drink was refilling on its own at this point.
• Ambiguous Gender: Pavlova the vampire who crafts prosthetic limbs. Taylor uses "them" pronouns when she interacts with them.
• ...And That Would Be Wrong: For Christmas, Neville sends Harry a Venus Flytrap and a charm that "you should never, ever use on this plant, not even if you're alone and there are some spare birds around and you want to give it a special treat." Harry makes sure to memorise the charm.
• Animorphism: Taylor looks into becoming an Animagus as a way of sneaking into Hogwarts, but it turns out that her form would be a praying mantis, and she's concerned about how that might interact with her shard (ie it might mean that the shard gets total control of her unless and until it chooses to transform her back). Instead, she resorts to a curse-based transformation, which is painful and slower, but allows her to change into any animal. (Ordinarily it would be impossible to undo the curse oneself, but since she uses magic via her shard instead of naturally, she can still access it in animal form.)
• Apologetic Attacker: Sirius apologises to Taylor, just before she loses consciousness from the potion he slipped into her tea.
• Apology Gift: Taylor doesn't think Sirius can come with anything suitable, but he insists he has a lot of experience with making mistakes that he needs to apologise for, and she agrees to let him try.
• An Arm and a Leg: Taylor has already lost an arm before the story starts, but she loses the other one to Voldemort. Fortunately the magical world has quite good prosthetics.
• Blackmail: Upon seeing Fleur Delacour's distress in the Black Lake, Taylor reflects that if she were in the position of having to rescue Harry for a competition, she would have taken a judge hostage and threatened to drown him on dry land until Harry was returned.
• Babies Make Everything Better: Harry was specifically chosen by Contessa's Path to prevent Taylor from attempting to escape. It works; within a few years, Taylor is very attached to motherhood and to her new son.
  Contessa: This child is optimal for ensuring you never attempt to leave this dimension, or to you being happy here. Or both.
• Batman Grabs a Gun: Dumbledore sees Leviathan in Taylor's memories, and reluctantly states that if he had been there, he might have cast the Killing Curse for the first time. Though it likely wouldn't have helped.
• Blood Magic: Sirius knows a bit about the magical uses of blood, though all he tells Taylor is that tossing forcibly taken blood into a cauldron will have Explosive Results, unless the recipe actually wants blood, in which case it's extremely dark magic.
• Booby Trap: Sirius warns Taylor not to touch the books in his family library, since she might count as a Muggle for the purposes of the protective enchantments, and the results would likely be messy. He's intrigued when she suggests using bugs, though.
  Sirius: I've always wanted to see what some of those traps do.
• Broken Pedestal: When Harry actually does do his best to study ahead and prepare for Potions classes, with Hermione's help, but is constantly persecuted by Professor Snape anyway, Hermione is confronted with the reality that teachers don't always know what they're doing or have the students' best interests at heart. She doesn't forget it, either, quickly seeing through Professor Lockhart's pretense in second year, and being willing to entertain suspicions about Professor Dumbledore's intentions.
• Cute and Psycho: When Mad-Eye Moody is transformed into a six-inch toothless snake to keep him from causing trouble, that doesn't stop him from futilely trying to attack anyone he can reach, including headbutting Taylor in the eyes.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon:
  • Bugs are very useful for making over-the-top threats that are actually credible.
    Taylor: I will stop shoving flies in your eyes and nose if you lie still. If you attack me again, I will set them to eating your eyes, and even if you kill me they won't stop until they're done. Are we clear?
  • When Sirius asks Taylor under Veritaserum about her feelings on Dumbledore, she replies that she'd like to strangle him with his beard.
• De-power: Taylor's bug control powers are suppressed when she arrives in Harry's world. Until they awaken again and break through her Obliviation.
• Distant Finale: The epilogue is set eight years after the events of the main story.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Harry Hebert does not like being called "Potter" and will immediately correct anyone who does so.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Sirius' excuse for being a heavy drinker mid-Hogwarts is a combination of his disappointed family, having to watch James chase after Lily when she wasn't interested, and being stuck in Transfiguration classes. Taylor isn't impressed.
  If that was the minimum agony level needed to become an alcoholic, Taylor herself would have died from alcohol poisoning long before getting her powers, along with half the population of Earth Bet. "Sure. Such agony."
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Black family dabbled in a lot of messed up magic, but their stance on Summoning is to not learn anything about it and keep it that way. Voldemort's viewpoint on Summoning is murkier, with Dumbledore musing he might not have tried to use it because it's useless in the modern era rather than out of ethical concerns.
• Exact Words:
  • As Contessa promised, Taylor's new world does not contain parahuman powers nor entities. Magic, on the other hand...
  • Upon returning to Grimmauld Place, Sirius orders Kreacher to do "nothing else" but clean the house. He later finds Kreacher's body in a cupboard, starved to death.
• The Exile: Taylor's whole presence in the Harry Potter universe is essentially an exile from her own world, in the aftermath of saving it. She considers it an upgrade from the execution that she was expecting.
• Facial Horror: Thanks to his scars, Taylor's first impression of Alastor Moody's face is "an example of what not to do when dealing with a malfunctioning blender."
• Family of Choice: After his own traumatic childhood, Sirius is able to respect Taylor's claim to be Harry's mother, regardless of blood.
  She'd picked Harry, done the work to properly stake her claim by single-handedly — ha — raising him, and he loved her. Matter closed.
• Giant Spider: Taylor's bug control power tries hard to take control of the Acromantula colony in the Forbidden Forest, but eventually gives up in disgust. They're just too big, too magical, too intelligent, or all three.
• Good Parents: Taylor puts her all into raising Harry, which is why he doesn't believe Dumbledore's story about her cutting off contact.
  "You've got an enthusiastic one," the woman behind her commented. Her son was still clinging to her side, silently refusing to let go. "What's your secret?"
  Being so overly careful out of worry that she had turned out to be a halfway decent mother through overcorrection, maybe. Taylor smiled as she watched her son claim a half-dozen crayons and paper. "I don't think there is one."
• Head Desk: As Taylor isn't properly magical, she assumes that she can't use the Floo, and goes to convoluted lengths to find other means of transport. When she learns, several months later, that Muggles can use the Floo without any difficulty, she promptly starts beating her head against a wall. (In snake form, to Harry's bemusement.)
• Hero Antagonist: Dumbledore was thoroughly freaked by Queen Administrator lurking in Taylor's mind, rightly concluding the shard was an Eldritch Abomination with the potential to cause thousands of deaths and spread. His obliviating her and taking Harry away was because he wanted to keep a potential patient zero for an extradimensional alien infection isolated from the magic world, and Taylor grudgingly concedes he wasn't wrong to worry even if she still loathes him.
• Human Sacrifice: The curse that Taylor uses to transform into an animal can only be undone by the original caster, or by a nasty process that involves sacrificing virgins. Sirius mentions that the curse fell out of favour because it had such a high body-count for something that was supposed to be non-lethal.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Inverted when Sirius is quite apologetic for ambushing and interrogating Taylor about her shard, but she insists that not only did he more or less do the right thing, he needs to be prepared to do it again if the situation arises — though with an adjusted approach. Namely, she wants to be able to feel safe at home, so he's not allowed to kidnap her from there, it has to be when she's out and about.
• Immortality Seeker: The Queen Administrator shard wants to exist forever. It also wishes to prevent Taylor's demise because it got attached to her. It's quite excited by Voldemort's claim that magic has made him immortal, because that implies there are ways for Taylor to achieve it too.
• I Never Got Any Letters: Subverted when Harry takes his mother's silence, not as proof of Dumbledore's claims that she rejected all things magical including Harry himself, but rather as proof that something must be interfering, because he knows there is no way that she wouldn't take some kind of action, if only to pull him out of school.
• Innocent Bigot: Wizards and witches dismiss Taylor as Harry's mother because she's nothing but a Muggle. It very much angers and upsets Harry who doesn't waste the opportunity to call them out.
• Irony: Dumbledore's efforts to prevent the Eldritch Abomination lurking in Taylor's mind to become a threat helped it to reconnect with her, and since she's very much pissed at the old wizard for stealing her son away...
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Dumbledore's work on Taylor is quite elegant; she's even able to give bland answers to her co-workers' questions about Harry, before changing the topic, without realising or remembering what she's saying.
  Whole conversations and encounters were blanks she was only now filling in, ripped from her mind by some sort of continuous Stranger effect even as an associated Master effect had her unwittingly hide her own selective amnesia to avoid arousing suspicion.
  It was clever. Clever like taking a wrecking ball to a mailbox and not caring that there was nowhere for the mail to go after.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Dumbledore's solution to the threat Taylor, or more specifically the presence he senses lurking in her mind, poses is to Obliviate all her memories of Harry with no explanation rather than risk triggering it. Sirius solves the threat Dumbledore poses to Taylor by Obliviating all his memories of her rather than risk Dumbledore not accepting their explanation.
• Lock-and-Load Montage: Just before following Barty Crouch's portkey, Taylor holds her wand in the air (for appearances' sake), and calls tens of thousands of insects, covering her robes, her hair, even her empty sleeve.
  Neville: That's awesome. Can you breed more bees?
  Hermione: She has enough bees.
• Make Sure He's Dead: Harry has learned well from his mother. After expelling Diary!Riddle and waking Ginny, Harry immobilises her with a petrifying jinx, just in case the spirit isn't entirely gone. Madam Pomfrey later confirms that it's entirely possible she was still partially possessed at the time.
• Mama Bear: When she discovers that Harry has been taken away from her, and her memories of him have been removed, for nearly two years, Taylor goes on the warpath.
• More than Mind Control: Diary!Riddle didn't just possess Ginny, he also worked on reshaping her personality to be more like himself, so that it would be easier to take over completely. And even after he's banished, some of the effects linger; Ginny is aware that she's a bit cruder and crueller than before, and she has academic insights beyond what she should.
• Mundane Utility: At the World Cup, Taylor co-opts the local flies and diverts them away from the food whenever they come in range of her control.
• Mutual Masquerade: Sirius Black, escaped convict whom everyone knows is pursuing revenge on Harry, teams up with a mysterious witch commanding swarms of insects and seeking Harry for unstated purposes — each managing to convince the other of their own nefarious intentions because they think it's what the other one wants to hear. Fortunately, Peter Pettigrew is equally fooled by Taylor's persona, and throws himself on her mercy, believing her to be a fellow servant of Voldemort — and in the process, revealing Sirius' true nature, which soon gets things cleared up.
  He exhaled, thankful he wouldn't need to muster up a convincing argument. They'd go after the rat. They'd get the rat. Then he would get rid of her, well before she would expect betrayal. She thought Harry was his prize, and that he needed her to get to him. Neither was true.
  ...
  He could be as moderately pleasant as he wanted; he intended to hurt her son and belonged to a group who tortured and killed as standard operating procedure. She would feel no regret when it came time to betray him.
• Oblivious Adoption: All the paperwork says that Taylor is Harry's birth mother, and that's what she tells people, so Harry Hebert insists to everyone at Hogwarts that he doesn't know anything about this Harry Potter character, and he couldn't possibly be the son of James and Lily. (In more introspective moments, he internally decides that with all the fuss and trouble around the Potters, even if it turned out to be true, he'd rather be Harry Hebert than Harry Potter anyway.)
• Once Killed a Man with a Noodle Implement: Taylor warns that if Dumbledore erased Harry's memories of her, then she'll find him and "shove cockroaches down his throat until he drowns on dry land." And internally notes that she has done it before.
• Only Sane Man: Harry finds himself in the position of being the rock his friends come to for advice, and decides that if he's going to fill that role, he should get used to it. Unless Luna can do it.
  "I'm learning to cast a ghost octopus," Luna informed the group. "It can't open jars, though."
  Yes, it was probably going to have to be him.
• Out-of-Character Alert: When stuck-up, rule-abiding Percy Weasley is careless with the Triwizard prize money, and then gets up during the Third Task to go see his sister, Taylor decides that things don't add up, following him and calling for backup. Sure enough, it's a Polyjuiced imposter.
• Parental Substitute: Subverted with Molly Weasley — she wanted to mother Harry in order to show him what "a proper wizard parent" is supposed to be, only for the boy to thoroughly evade her attempts since he's quite happy with Taylor as his mom.
• People Puppets: Rita Skeeter is thoroughly freaked out by her brief experience wandering into Taylor's range in beetle form. She's perfectly obedient, just like every other bug, but as soon as Taylor sends her back out of range, she immediately transforms back to human, collapses and hyperventilates.
• Percussive Therapy: Taylor avoids punching the walls after realising her memories had been erased, because they're Harry's, but many of her bugs kill each other to vent her frustrations.
• Pervert Revenge Mode: When Taylor inadvertently Portkeys into the Ministry topless, with just a bra, after her consultation for a prosthetic arm, Sirius cautions the clerks nearby not to stare.
  Sirius: It's bad for your health.
• Police Are Useless: Taylor actually does try reporting Dumbledore kidnapping Harry to the Aurors. However, they not only don't take her seriously the first few times but, when she pushes, bring in the very person she is accusing, immediately trust his version of events, and allow him to memory charm her. Understandably, she gives up on legal avenues after that.
• Power at a Price: The more affordable magical prosthetic arms come with limitations on safe amounts of usage, per day or per month, or even require sacrifices. Top-end models aren't limited in that way, but are very expensive to purchase.
  Pavlova: If you want a clean, ethical, and safe arm, an arm that connects to your will but does not have any chance of side effects… Four hundred galleons.
• Properly Paranoid: After he recovers, Professor Moody is quite impressed by Taylor lurking as Harry's bodyguard in snake form, and claiming that she's penetration-testing the castle.
  Moody: This is more common sense than I've heard since taking the job as Defense Professor.
• Red Herring: Moody is seen drinking from a flask that he claims to be water but doesn't smell like it, leading readers to suspect that, like canon, he's Barty Crouch Jr disguised with Polyjuice. It's actually just alcohol.
• Refusal of the Call: Upon hearing that the holly and phoenix feather wand is connected to Voldemort's, Harry lies to Ollivander about feeling a connection to it (to Ollivander's disappointment), and buys a different wand. And despite everyone noticing that he looks like Harry Potter, has a scar like Harry Potter, and even shares a first name with Harry Potter, he's not interested.
  Harry didn't care what they said, they being everyone from Dumbledore to the kids he was talking to now. He knew who he was, and even if he didn't, he didn't want to be famous anyway. He just wanted to learn to do cool things with magic. His mum always said fame was overrated and people were stupid about famous people, and now he knew she was right.
• Sacred Hospitality: Pavlova the vampire is a legitimate business owner, whose customers are perfectly safe on the premises, but Sirius realises partway through the conversation that that only lasts as long as they are customers. The moment negotiations have concluded, Sirius grabs Taylor's arm and activates their Portkey home.
  Sirius: I think only one of us counted as a customer there, and I'm not sure which of us it was. Once I'd paid, either you or I were in serious danger if we stayed.
• Sarcasm Mode: While writing a fairly generic acceptance letter for an interview to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts, Sirius narrates it rather differently.
  Sirius: Dear Albus 'three middle names I can never remember' Dumbledore. I'd love to apply for a job I have absolutely no interest in taking, in a position that we all know is cursed, especially when you specifically do not say what's happened to Moody that made him unable to continue teaching, unless he's just smarter than your average Defense Professor and getting out while he can. I, as we both know, am entirely suited to a position of authority over mischievous children, and am fully capable of stuffing their impressionable heads with useful and age-appropriate magical knowledge. I have even spent the last few months tutoring a sadistic, disturbingly violent and creative woman in how to best exploit magic to her own ends, so I have some experience! Rest assured that the meager salary Hogwarts can offer to compensate me is unnecessary, as I will in the event of taking the job require my payment in Snape's tears and mandatory nude lessons for the seventh-year students–
  Taylor: Teachers who creep on students lose their favorite limb.
  Sirius: Which I of course would not be attending. But I believe there is much to learn from dueling while starkers, so it will be a core part of the curriculum should I get the job. I would like to conduct this interview with a jury of my future peers in attendance, to ensure they know what you are attempting to subject them to next year, so I can meet you at the earliest time both Professor Sprout and Professor Flitwick are available to observe the interview. Lovingly yours, the worst possible person to put in charge of children, Sirius 'homewrecker handsome devil' Black.
• Secret Test of Character: Giving Sirius his wand back is actually less of a gesture of trust than he thinks, when he has a collar full of insects that could suffocate him before he could cast a spell, but it's a useful test of how he'll respond.
• Shock and Awe: Played for Laughs with Hermione, whose accidental magic builds up a static charge whenever she gets worked up, but only enough to make her hair fluffier and give her a shock when she touches metal. Harry gives her a book about lightning magic "for your hair" for Christmas.
• Something Only They Would Say: Taylor proves her identity to Harry by talking about the accidental magic incident where she realised that something wasn't normal and asked him questions designed to identify a possible trigger event.
  Taylor: I had completely the wrong idea about what was going on, and couldn't understand when you insisted the only thing wrong in your life was that you didn't have a television in your room.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: Taylor is a little overwhelmed by how witches and wizards are all "budget Eidolons," often with less raw power than Eidolon himself, but with immense versatility and long cultural experience.
  They all theoretically had access to hundreds of powers, and that was just charms.
• Symbiotic Possession: In Scion's absence, the Queen Administrator shard has latched onto Taylor and wants to help and protect her. It still has alien values, but it can understand rage and cooperation and protecting what is hers, which is enough for them to work together.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Sirius adds a sleeping potion to Taylor's tea so he can question her about her passenger. He hates doing it, but Dumbledore's warnings about summoning entities that don't belong in the world have him thoroughly spooked.
• Thanks for the Mammary:
  • Harry is caught up in a hug as soon as Mrs Weasley sees him for the first time.
    Harry: I… don't think I've seen your mother's face yet? Just her chest.
  • When teaching Harry to dance, including some magically assisted high-flying stunt moves, Sirius cautions him that, "Girls have natural handholds, but you're not allowed to use those on a first date."
• That Came Out Wrong: To cover up the pain of her curse-based transformation to and from a moose (which wouldn't be painful if she were a true Animagus), Taylor tells the registration staff that "Going from having a rack to not having one is really uncomfortable." It takes her several minutes to realise why the clerk blushed.
• There Are No Therapists: Taylor does actually recognise that she has a need for therapy, but ultimately decides that it wouldn't be effective as long as she lies and covers up most of her history, and there's no way she could be truthful.
  She supposed she would just have to do without.
• Tracking Device: Taylor plants tracking tags on many of the students, in order to find her way to Hogwarts. But they stop working once the Hogwarts Express leaves the station.
• Trauma Button: It's not entirely clear just how Taylor reacted when her work colleagues jumped out to surprise her on her birthday, but the narrative mentions that it was "not minor."
  Nobody was hurt, thankfully.
• Unequal Pairing: Defied by Sirius, who recognises that he gets along well with Taylor but refuses on principle to try dating her, because he's paying her medical bills and legally has custody of Harry, giving him too much power over her.
  There was a difference between roguish and rapey, and he prided himself on knowing exactly where that line was so he didn't cross it.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Everyone agrees that Dumbledore's motives for removing Taylor's memories of Harry and keeping him away from her were, on the whole and in the big picture, understandable and valid, but his methods were more questionable and precluded more moderate solutions.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Taylor immediately recognises the signs of Harry having a parahuman power, and starts blaming herself for overlooking something going so wrong that he could have a trigger event. She's baffled when questioning him doesn't reveal anything.^note It's actually bouts of accidental magic, of course, which works by totally different rules.

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This is an entirely normal page. No Flash, no Shockwave, no knowledge that either ever existed. I am going to leave you here, and no parahuman will ever return to this wiki.