Harry Potter: Survivor

My name is Harry Potter and I am a survivor.

I might be other things: male, English, white, a wizard. But none of these matter except that I am a survivor.

It's been five years now. Five years to the day. Hard to believe some times.

It's been five years since what other survivors have taken to calling "M-Day."

M-Day isn't a time for celebration. There were no great and terrible battles fought that day. It was, weather wise, quite typical for Britain: temperatures well within the average range, smatterings of sun, clouds and rain. It was also the most devastating day of my entire life. Even the day my parents were offed doesn't compare to M-Day.

Five years ago magic ceased to exist for 27.347 minutes.

Now, for most people that doesn't seem like a big deal. Not even a half an hour, who cares about how you can't wiggle your wand for a time? Well, that doesn't take into effect the shear stupidity of how the magical world operated. All magic was effected by some kind of disjunction. It wasn't a blink or an on/off switch. For those 27.347 minutes it did not exist. All enchanted objects lost all enchantments. All wards came down. All protective spells were disrupted. Any personal magical effects vanished. When magic returned 27.347 minutes later, these did not go back up. They remained as if they had never been enchanted in the first place.

Now, I could talk about all the magical items we lost and how sad it is, but truth be told, I don't really give a damn about that.

Because M-Day was when the magical world died for one simple, overused charm.

The thrice-be-damned undetectable expansion charm.

It was used commonly in houses. Need a new room? Throw up some expansion charms and conjure a few walls!

Well, those got canceled as well.

Pretty much every magical building has them. This accounts for how massively large the Ministry of Magic was. The Burrow (which was blessedly empty at the time save for the attic ghoul), was supported primarily by expansion charms.

When M-Day began, those expansion charmed rooms instantly became uncharmed and everything went back to its previous size.

Every person who had the misfortune to be in Hogwarts at the start of the 27.347 minutes was crushed to death. Over half the buildings of Diagon Alley were the result of such charms. Hermione and I were lucky, we were outside the wizard tent. Ron was inside having seconds. He didn't even have enough time to scream.

In an instant, the magical population of Great Britain was decreased by 95%.

Now, it wasn't all bad. Tom Riddle, better known as Voldemort, better known as you-know-who (unless you don't, which makes that last nickname hilarious), was a magical construct that clung to life via horcruxes. That what me, Hermione and Ron were looking for. Well, without magic to sustain them, they vanished as did Tom Riddle. All his anchors for his soul were gone, just replaced by pretty trinkets. His Death Eaters died in great numbers as well since many of them were in Diagon Alley or in their homes where the walls suddenly lost their shape.

The goblins died in countless numbers, the death toll greater than any Rebellion. Gringott's was still a series of subterranean tunnels, but the spells fell that kept out groundwater, and the Thames came rushing in to fill the void. Apparently you could see the sudden drop in water level from any place you could see the river. There were no house elves after those 27.347 minutes. As creatures of pure magic, they could not survive and succumbed to erasure of existence. The Centaurs fared quite well, especially when they no longer had to deal with the massive Acromantula infestation in their forest. While not as magical as house elves, their massive size required quite a bit of magic to keep upright. Gravity did its job and only the smallest of the small survived, making the event positively Darwinian.

The next great shift that occurred had just as devastating an effect even if the death toll was absolutely zero. Absolutely every memory charm failed.

Lockhart aside, the Wizarding World still does tend to hand them out like candy. See a muggleborn kid make a toy glow? Obliviate! See the crazy old lady next door talk to her cats and have the cats talk back? Obliviate? Get blown up by your brother's nephew? Obliviate!

When you consider the massive number of "adjustments" made to keep the magical world secret, you can understand how terrible it was to have every instance pop back up. While we were in England, Wendal and Monica Wilkins went out for dinner, but Mr. and Mrs. Granger went home. Due to the actions of a certain masked and black robed group, there were plenty of muggles out for blood. Marge Dursley was certainly out for my blood and made no less than fifteen attempts at having me arrested for witchcraft, which, by the way, is so far from being a crime in the real Britain it isn't funny. What was funny was the look on her face when I gave my side of things in a court of law. Aunt Marge, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia now reside at Her Majesty's leisure.

Things weren't going so well for the remainder of magicals due to Tommy's homocidal friends. Within hours of getting their memories back, several MPs were pushing to have us all treated like traitors. It wasn't quite racial profiling, but close, magic-profiling? Hermione can give you the details, but it boils down to they wanted to treat all spellcasters the same way. Granted, we'd been pretty careful about hiding, so the only exposure most people had was Tommy's band of merry men. However, the squibs of the more kindly families, the relatives of muggleborns, spouses and other non-magicals in the know, quickly started to speak out in our defense. I liked what one said to the papers: "Calling them all dark wizards is like saying all Scotts play the bagpipes while cutting people up with claymores! It just isn't true!"

Well, Hermione and me? We survived.

There were other survivors as well: Tonks, and Remus who had been taking a walk outside; Susan Bones and the 7th year herbology class; the Slytherin/Gryffindor first year students in their flying lesson; a number of people outside in Hogsmeade and a few in those few houses that didn't use massive amounts of magic in construction. Ginny didn't make it, but Molly, Arthur, Charlie, Fred and George did. Bill died in Shell Cottage while Fleur was sitting on the veranda catching some rays, and we think Percy was in the Ministry when it fell. Bathilda Bagshot, the old woman who wrote "History of Magic" survived, but had to be helped out from under the gigantic snake that tried to pounce on her. Nagini died when the enchantments on her failed. The Knightbus crew happened to be at a stop, so only the driver died. Hagrid survived as he was in the forest. A huge number of former werewolves survived, having spent most of their lives away from civilization since their infection. The rolls of the dead were considered a small price to pay for the cure in their minds. Well, except for Greyback, but well, muggle science has linked him to countless deaths and he was quite easy to apprehend when one cannot use portkeys, spells or transform into a slaughter-machine. There were smatterings of survivors here and there.

We don't know what happened to Azkaban. It just...wasn't there as far as we've been able to tell. It's been different at different times. Sometimes it was a massive stone pillar, or a rectangular keep, or a three story, but still a very large building. It changed and changed and changed over time. Hermione thinks it has something to do with the dementors' presence and overly stressed witches and wizards having late-in-life accidental magic. What we do know is that it doesn't exist anymore. It's not unplottable, as that would have fallen on M-Day, it just isn't there anymore.

Delores Umbridge did not survive M-Day. That particular day, she decided to visit one of her extermination camps for "halfbreeds" and "mudbloods." Well, many of those "mudbloods" learned at least a little on how to fight the muggle way and when one realized the spells weren't working, the whole lot of them rose up in rebellion. Ole Delores and her buddies weren't the most physical fit of people and so were literally trampled underfoot in the prisoners' charge to freedom.

Isn't it ironic that Umbridge's work at rounding up the muggleborns and multi-racials turned into them being the most dominant group of magicals? Hermione and I find it hilarious today, but back then we were still pretty devastated.

We were sure that what happened to Ron was the start of an attack. The tent, unlike most other buildings with expansion charms, was made of cloth, something with less strength than most of what we had inside. The flaps were also open. The collapse of the charms sent loose objects flying out the flaps and threw the cloth as it attempted to shrink inside back to it's proper outer size. I don't really understand the specifics of it, I'm still not very good at extra dimensional physics. But Hermione and I ducked as pots, pans, knives, beds, books and all assorted other things came flying at us. The fact that we suddenly couldn't apparate out or cast spells "confirmed" that theory, so we ran. We ran and we ran and we ran until our lungs burned, our joints ached and we had no energy to take even one more step. No attack came.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote this a while back. It's more of an outline or a list of events, very telling rather than showing. I like the idea, but haven't been able to turn it into anything more than what you see here.