"Saving Connor" - Lightning on the Wave

Title: Saving Connor
Author: Lightning on the Wave
About the Book: Pure Awesome, Fiction, Fanfiction, Adventure, Alternate Universe, Psychological (I don't know what else to call it)
My rating: 10/10.
Fandom: Harry Potter

Lightning on the Wave deserves an amazing introduction - unfortunately, relatively little is known about her. I have heard that others pieced together that she was studying for her Ph.D. and teaching some university-level classes a few years back and I've seen her mentioning a Ph.D. somewhere. This is the curse of fanfiction authors: they are here, then they are gone. It's not a curse upon their heads, but upon the heads of their readers. You can never quite keep track and all you have is amazing stories to testify that they exist.

"Saving Connor" is the first part of a series of 7 AUs (each corresponding, like the canon, to a school year). James and Lily Potter are still alive. Harry has a twin brother, Connor, who is the Boy-Who-Lived. Harry has his lightning bolt-shaped scar from canon, but Connor has a heart-shaped scar that shows off his status. Sirius and Remus are quite well and Peter Pettigrew is in Azkaban. Coming to this story from canon, it looks like your basic dream-fulfilment story. Except Lightning has a way of twisting dreams into nightmares.

The characters are amazingly built. Connor is a carefree heroic type, not very bright and very blunt, living his childhood. Harry, a quiet, studious type, loves him to pieces and will protect him and give him a happy life at all costs - and you will come to hate this love along with many other characters before "Saving Connor" is done. Lily is sweetness personified, Albus is a shrewd leader, James is as shiny as a nice Gryffindor should be. With these patterns in mind, Lightning dances around expectations, revealing new facets underneath masks.

First line of the book: "What are your vows, Harry?"

I thought I saw where this was going from the beginning. I thought this was going to be an overly-long series about Harry Potter always being in the shadows and Connor taking the spotlight. I thought Harry and Lily had a conspiracy going to save the world and that it would go on forever.

I was wrong.

Harry knew what they were, even though he was only five. He whispered them as his mother held him over his brother's bed, and his mother said them with him, murmured hypnotic words that Harry had heard his whole life.

This first book in the series follows the plot of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" closely enough, but you still have hints of things that are entirely different. Holes that JK Rowling left open in the originals are now filled.

Why do pureblooded wizards despise wizards born out of normal families?... Because purebloods have their own, very rich culture, centering on magic and rituals and they believe that outsiders are threatening this. Why is Lucius Malfoy such a stuck-up? It's part of his Dark culture, complete with facade. As the story goes by it becomes clearer and clearer that the magical world has its very clear subtle lines, courtesies, practices which are visibile to those who are born into it, invisible to outsiders, who then look like fools.

There are also some very significant differences between the canon and "Saving Connor", new meanings added to events which start adding up to a feeling of wrongness which will eventually get explained (in the next part of the series), but which is not at all accidental. After all, mostly all the scenes are written from Harry Potter's third person POV, which means that somewhere... in there... there is a problem.

"The unicorn was a sacrifice. He'd been a sacrifice, in Lily's terms, even though he didn't think of himself that way; he was just making sure that Connor got to enjoy a chance in the sun that would otherwise be snatched away, and unfairly.

And he loved his brother enough to lie for him, and to burn a troll for him, and to let a unicorn die for him."

It's an engaging story, with an occasional snippet of humor that strikes gold. Again, the characters are very well-developed and Narcissa is one of my favorites in this series. The take on Dumbledore will (eventually) change your views on him forever and even Voldemort manages to be more purely evil than in the original. Another bonus point is that there is very little left to chance and victories happen with any amount of preparation and care taken in advance. Battles between strong wizards are indeed impressive, violent scenes are just as violent as they need to be, politics with its conflicting interests is very well described.

A ten out of ten for style, plot, ideas, background culture, characterizations and generally everything. Including being annoying in all the right places to show that people aren't always perfect or smart, but not annoying enough to make you stop reading.

You can find it here.