Chapter Text
The hands resting in his lap were small, pale, and entirely foreign.
Sitting in the centre of the massive, velvet-draped bed, he took a slow breath and quietly conceded that his sanity had officially forsaken him.
He slipped off the edge of the towering mattress, his bare feet hitting the dark hardwood floor with a soft, pathetic thud.
Pacing toward the ornate silver mirror across the room, he rubbed his temples in a very controlled, arguably reasonable dread.
There was no explanatory reason why he was here the way he was; as of now—in the present time—he was nowhere near where he was supposed to be.
"This makes no sense," he muttered under his breath, his high, childish voice startling him. "This is a dream. A lucid, ridiculously detailed stress dream."
If that particular sentence did not make any sense at all, then it was arguably reasonable as it was.
He couldn't be expected to explain any kind of rationalisation for what had happened to him—the fact that he was in fact occupying, or even worse, possessing another's body.
He stepped closer to the glass, gripping the edges of the mahogany dresser so hard his knuckles turned stark white.
Currently, he was having a momentary lapse of what reality was, and whether reality was, subsequently, non-existent.
Of course, the glaringly obvious reason was that he, in fact, did not originally have soft dark-coloured hair, or vivid green eyes, or such refined English features and a boyish look.
He gave a slow, disbelieving twirl, inspecting the expensive, silken fabric of his nightclothes.
He raised a small hand. The reflection raised a small hand.
No. Absolutely not.
His tiny chest began to heave, his breath growing shallow and rapid.
To say the least, he did not appreciate waking up inside a stranger's body, much less a child's.
In the grand scheme of things, he considered himself a man of healthy morals and mindset.
As a modern man of the twenty-first century in his prime, he had neither provoked nor invited the bizarreness he currently found himself in.
He was a normal working figure in a normal society, just trudging through life as it was. A man of mundane Tuesday afternoons.
He stopped his pacing and stared hard at his reflection. He pinched the soft flesh of his forearm.
He flinched. It stung.
"Wake up," he whispered, his voice trembling.
He raised a hand and slapped his own cheek—hard.
The sharp crack echoed in the quiet room, leaving a blooming patch of red on his pale skin.
The pain was immediate, sharp, and undeniably real.
His logic scrambled, desperately trying to build a bridge over the abyss. A coma. I got into a car crash on the way home. A brain aneurysm. A carbon monoxide leak in the apartment. I am dying in a hospital bed right now, and my brain is hallucinating to cope with the trauma.
He nodded frantically to himself, clinging to the diagnosis. Yes. That was it.
So, as to how his unfortunate situation had decided to propel him into another's body, he did not have an answer. Furthermore, he would very much like one.
But it appeared it was a bit too much for this body—this small child's mind—to ponder and meander through the thought of an actual existential, universal, behemoth-like crisis.
The rabbit hole opened beneath him, and he plummeted.
His small hands flew to his head, his fingers digging viciously into his dark hair, pulling at the roots until his scalp burned.
His emotions entangled themselves, knotting and fraying like a ruined ball of yarn batted around by restless cats.
He paced in tight, frantic circles, his chest hitching as he hyperventilated.
He could not find the end of the thread. He could not calculate the trajectory of how a regular man had been violently propelled into this nightmare.
This isn't real. It isn't real. Wake up!
He glared into the shadows of the corners, his eyes wild.
The room was suffocating him. The heavy velvet drapery felt like a burial shroud.
He demanded an answer from the silent, heavy air of the bedroom, but the room offered nothing but the oppressive, deafening ticking of a grandfather clock down the hall.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The emotional turmoil mutated. What began as a psychological existential crisis sharpened into a physical, terrifying pressure.
He gasped as it pooled in his chest, hot and viscous, rising in his throat like bile.
His heart hammered furiously against his small ribs, threatening to crack them.
He realised, with a sudden spike of alarm, that something inside this small body was fundamentally broken—or perhaps, terrifyingly functional.
It was a wellspring of volatile, unseen energy, and his modern, rational mind had no mechanism to compress it.
The logic loop had failed. The hallucination theory had shattered.
The absolute impossibility of his existence crashed down on him all at once.
He clutched his chest, stumbling backwards from the mirror, his legs giving out beneath him.
He hit the floor, scrambling backwards until his spine hit the footboard of the bed. He could not stop it.
He did not know how to shut the valve.
The pressure built until the air in the bedroom grew sharply cold.
Frost crept up the edges of the silver glass. The heavy velvet curtains began to violently tremble against the window frames, whipping the air into a frenzy.
And then, the dam broke.
A concussive bang ruptured the silence—echoing not just within his eardrums, but resonating deep within the marrow of his borrowed bones.
The force of it shattered the bedroom windows, sending a rain of glittering glass out into the dark London night.
The mahogany dresser splintered into jagged shards.
The physical shockwave was instantly followed by a mental one.
He doubled over as the ringing pain inside his skull catapulted glimpses of memories that were not his own.
They were fleeting, yet profoundly deeply rooted—echoes of a short life lived within high walls.
They came pouring into him, glaringly obvious and thunderous, tearing through the modern barricades of his mind like a waterfall cascading through the cracks of a crumbling gorge.
Through a dizzying haze, he saw the imposing, dark-stone facade of a townhouse.
He flinched as he felt the phantom burn of a stinging hex on his small fingers.
He heard the haughty, clipped tones of pure-blood supremacy whispered over lavish dinner tables.
The memories unravelled, violently stitching themselves into his own consciousness.
He could not fathom the sheer volume of it until his brain simply refused to process any more.
His vision tunnelled. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed fully onto the floor, gratefully surrendering to the blurry, suffocating darkness.
Just before the void took him completely, he heard the frantic, heavy thud of footsteps rapidly approaching in the hall.
The heavy oak door of his bedroom was blown open with a violent crash.
Through the haze of his fading consciousness, he saw two faces looming over his small frame.
A man and a woman. Their features were sharp, arrogant, and terrifyingly familiar.
Fuck, his fading mind supplied.
And then the darkness swallowed him whole.
Time lost its meaning in the void. There was no physical form, no burning magic, just a heavy, suffocating silence that slowly, gradually began to thin.
Awareness returned in fractured pieces, pierced first by a sharp gasp and the sharp, crackling taste of ozone.
He realised he had been moved back onto the towering mattress, but the air in the room was suddenly unbearable.
His infantile, newly awakened magical core violently recoiled.
Two immense, adult magical auras had flooded the bedroom, and his small body was drowning in them.
The first was jagged and hot, tearing through the ambient air like a flare.
"Incredible," the woman’s voice breathed, trembling with a manic, volatile edge. A wand slashed viciously through the air. "Reparo!"
The sharp crack of magic stung his skin. He heard the glittering shards of glass and splintered mahogany flying back together, grinding into place.
The air tasted of ash and copper.
"Look at this destruction, Orion," the woman gloated, her voice a shrill cacophony of absolute, terrifying triumph. "Look at the sheer power of it! A magical shockwave of this magnitude at barely three years of age. Toujours Pur. Our bloodline reigns supreme. The House of Black produces nothing but prodigies."
The names clicked into place, finalising the horrific realisation.
Orion and Walburga. The scions of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.
Then, the second aura settled over the room, and Altair felt his chest physically tighten, as if an anvil had been dropped onto his ribs.
This magic was silent. It was cold, heavy, and infinitely deep, washing out Walburga's fiery chaos with the oppressive weight of a frozen ocean.
The man did not speak. With a mere, unvoiced flick of his wand, Orion anchored a suffocating stabilisation ward over the room, suppressing the lingering tremors.
With another subtle motion, a pair of high-backed chairs glided across the hardwood, and he seated himself silently beside the bed.
Altair kept his breathing even, feigning sleep as his rational mind desperately pieced together the impossible truth.
In any modern standing or hypothesis, it would be incredibly improbable, and yet the reality was undeniable.
He had been reincarnated—transmigrated, reborn; all of those bedazzled words—into the body of a child in the dark, fanatical universe of Harry Potter.
The sheer magnitude of the danger he was in settled into his bones.
Through his closed eyelids, Altair could practically feel his father's gaze—a steadfast, terrifyingly intense stare that dissected the boy, carefully weighing the sheer magnitude of the power that had just been unleashed.
Steeling himself, Altair fluttered his heavy eyelids once, then twice, adjusting to the dim, warded light of the reconstructed room.
"My firstborn is indeed the firstborn. Congratulations, my dear Altair."
Walburga spoke softly now, having taken the second seat. Yet from the bed, looking up at her imposing silhouette, he could still feel the jagged edges of profound pride and a haughty certainty in her tone.
"I will record this in our family holdings," she noted, her voice steadying as she smoothed the immaculate front of her dark robes. "Your magical outburst was recorded at approximately three years old, on the nineteenth of March, 1959."
"A strong one indeed," Orion replied.
The pure-blood lord remained seated in the high-backed chair beside his wife; leaning slightly forward, he maintained that steady, calculating gaze over his son.
Altair—that was his name now. That was him. Altair Cygnus Black.
Orion narrowed his eyes carefully as he looked down at the tiny, dishevelled boy swallowed by the massive bed.
He had been reviewing material in his office when he felt the tremble and heard the distant crash.
Almost every child in the wizarding world would go through this period of time, but he rarely recalled it being followed by such a great shake. A rare feat, indeed.
A subtle, yet soft nod with a glimmer of parental pride appeared in his cold grey eyes as he looked approvingly at his son.
"Mother... Father…” Altair replied softly, shrinking back slightly against the headboard, his lungs genuinely struggling against the oppressive magic lingering in the room.
Fortunately, the two towering figures did not pick up on the subtle, adult wariness layered beneath his quiet greeting.
They attributed his subdued behaviour and shallow breathing to magical exhaustion, assuming their prodigious son was merely suffering from the physical toll of his immense power.
Satisfied that the heir was intact and exceptional, they went their separate ways.
Orion stood, his dark robes sweeping the floor, returning to his office to document the day’s gain, while Walburga swept out of the room with a triumphant rustle of silk, undoubtedly heading straight for the Floo network to casually, viciously brag to her sisters and extended relatives.
After all, pride was a garment they wore with ease in this pure-blood madness, wasn't it?
Left alone in the quiet, drafty bedroom, Altair stared up at the canopy.
They were completely unaware of the apocalyptic truth resting inside their son’s head.
There was not supposed to be a child in the Black family named Altair.
In the timeline he knew—the canon events he had read about in a life that now felt a million miles away—the firstborn was supposed to be Sirius.
That fact alone was a glaring, terrifying discrepancy.
The timeline was already fractured, and this small, violently powerful body was now the vessel for a much older, questionably wiser soul.
As he lay there, breathing in the lingering scent of ozone and old magic, he accepted the reality of the entrenched, dark world he was now bound to.
He knew the history. He knew the looming wars, the betrayals, and the tragic, senseless deaths brewing on the horizon.
He clenched his small fists at his sides; he had absolutely no intention of being killed, nor would he allow his second chance at life to be cut short by the fanaticism of a madman with a snake face.
He closed his green eyes, feeling the thrum of his newly discovered magical core settling deep within his chest.