Arc of Sacrifices

"To keep Connor safe. To always protect him. To insure that he lives as untroubled a life as he can, until he has to face Lord Voldemort again. To be his brother and his friend and his guardian. To love him. To never compete with him, never show him up, and never let anyone else know that I'm so close to him. To be ordinary, so that he can be extraordinary."

—Harry Potter's vows in regards to his brother, Connor Potter

Arc of Sacrifices, also known as Sacrifices Arc, is a Harry Potter Alternate Universe in which Harry's not only a Slytherin, but also a twin. That brother, Connor, wears the mantle of the Boy Who Lives, while Harry acts as his protector and guardian. The series is complete, featuring seven parts, each roughly paralleling the canon. It's notable for its story, a series twists and turns, and Alternate Character Interpretation. The author's page can be found here. The parts are, in order:

• Saving Connor
• No Mouth But Some Serpent's
• Comes Out Of Darkness Morn
• Freedom And Not Peace
• Wind That Shakes The Seas and Stars
• A Song In Time Of Revolution
• I Am Also Thy Brother

The series features examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Lily and James, though the latter was more neglectful than outright abusive.
  • Henrietta Bulstrode is one of these to her daughter, Edith.
• Aerith and Bob - besides canon examples, there are original characters who embody this trope. Contrast Connor, Owen and Marian with names such as Honoria, Medusa, and Ignifer.
• Alternate Universe
• Altum Videtur - the Apollonis family teaches their children to speak Latin from an early age. Additionally, at Connor's funeral, Harry says "Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale," which translates to "And now forever, brother, hail and farewell."
• Anyone Can Die - becomes more pronounced as the series continues.
• Ascended Extra - a couple of notable examples are Evan Rosier and Regulus Black, who aren't even alive during canon but both play important roles. Others include Millicent Bulstrode, Pansy Parkinson, and their families.
• Axe Crazy: Evan Rosier, to the point where he's considered crazy even by other Death Eaters.
  • Bellatrix Lestrange, in a more classical interpretation of the trope.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Lucius and Narcissa, at one point.
• Badass Bookworm: Hermione, of course, and also Thomas Rhangnara, one of Harry's Allies.
• Battle Couple: Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy as mentioned above, are a prominent example. There are apparently pureblood dances that are literal dances designed for battle couples.
  • Harry and Draco are another.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Used frequently.
• Beta Couple: Many. The most important is Connor/Parvati, but others include Hermione/Zacharias Smith, Millicent Bulstrode/Pierre Delacour, Honoria Pemberley/Ignifer Apollonis, as well as many of the married couples.
  • Played with in regards to Snape/Regulus, who never actually get together due to the latter's death. However, it's implied that they would have, and they're used as an interesting parallel to Draco and Harry nonetheless.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Harry, full stop.
  • Helga Hufflepuff made the stones of Hogwarts eat alive some people who were attacking students.
  • One of the defining traits of the Puellaris witches, who's greatest goal in life is to keep their husband and children safe. They are trained to be quiet, and submissive- in public. Threaten her children, and she literally becomes a lioness and bites off your head.
• Brilliant but Lazy: Sort of, with the Weasley twins. For example, at one point the do something to Snape's wand that makes it so that every time he casts a spell, something cute happens, like a pixie, or a pink snake with little hearts on it, or kittens, etc. They accomplish this by making it so that Snape's wand core switches out of his wand every time he casts a spell, replacing it with a different core that casts the cute spell, all without harming his wand.
  • Definitely for Draco, who is really very smart, just rather lazy. It is later revealed that his laziness is his greatest flaw.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Draco to Lucius in the fifth book, rather spectacularly.
• Character Development - Several characters, most prominently Draco, Connor and Harry.
• Children Are Innocent - played with. Lily doesn't exactly believe Harry himself is evil, just his magic which comes from Voldemort. Still, she never gave her son the choice to be good or evil.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Thomas Rhangara, one of Harry's allies and a philospoher who declared Dark because he thought it made more sense than Light magic, and Honoria Pemberly, another of Harry's allies.
• Creepy Twins - Sylvan and Oaken Yaxley, to the point where only one of them can exist at a time; the other one stays in an alternate dimension. They can swap in and out of reality. They manage this by taking the blood of unwilling sacrifices.
• Creepy Child - The wild Dark is described as "a spoiled child" often enough. As for the creepiness, it is literraly a mix between sentient Black Magic and Living Shadow
• Dark Is Not Evil - Dark Magic is magic which subverts someone's free will, but doesn't have to be evil. In fact, many of the good guys are Dark wizards who aren't psychopathic killers and thus don't want to follow Voldemort.
  • Evil Is One Big Happy Family - played with. There are former Death Eaters on Harry's side as well as Voldemort's.
  • Light Is Not Good - Dumbledore exemplifies this as a wizard devoted to the Light... who nevertheless use questionable means to accomplish his ends.
• Darker and Edgier - While the canon Harry Potter gets darker as it goes, this series starts there and grows increasingly more tragic as it goes on.
• Dating Catwoman - Evan Rosier and Henrietta Bulstrode.
• Department of Child Disservices
• Disproportionate Retribution: Inverted: Harry has suffered extreme mental and physical abuse, most of which carried itself into his psyche years after he finally broke the web that had held his magic and free will hostage for the better part of his childhood, thus causing him to never lead the normal life that Connor did despite the fact that he wasn't even the one who was supposed to save the world, all in the name of the Greater Good. Despite the fact that lesser instances of child abuse warrant the death penalty, Harry pleads with anyone who'll listen that what Lily, James, and Dumbledore did wasn't that bad. He even succeeds in convincing the Wizangamot to only put his parents into Tullianum for life. Indigena Yaxley fixes that soon enough.
• Doorstopper - All of the books after the third are long, with Wind That Shakes the Sea and Stars having over 750,000 words, according to Fanfiction.net's word counter.
• Dying Moment of Awesome - anyone who dies to destroy a Horcrux. Especially Connor, oh so much.
• Entitled Bastard - Burke
• Eye Scream - Harry to the Dark Lady Monika after he defeats Voldemort and absorbs his power; he laughs and one of her eyes bursts.
  • The Many snakes are a very poisonous breed of snake whose venom can kill a man in seconds. It can also cause someone to become irreparably blinded if it's spat in the eyes, as Harry effectively demonstrated with Voldemort.
• Face Heel Turn - Supposedly Michael Rosier-Henlin; it turns out that Voldemort was possessing him and made him do so.
• Fantastic Racism - Werewolves face some pretty heavy prejudice for their curse, and as the books progress, laws begin to come into effect that stop werewolves from having paying jobs and custody of children.
• Flat What - there are quite a number of them scattered throughout the stories, mostly in response to something Harry says or reveals.

Harry (pointing to a potion he's brewing): That's the first stage of a cure for lycanthropy, I think.
Hawthorn Parkinson, staring: What.

• Gotta Catch Them All - the Horcruxes, as in canon.
• Green Thumb - Indigena Yaxley is very good at this and to a lesser extent, Hawthorne Parkinson.
  • Neville also counts, since Harry went to him specifically to find out how exactly to counteract Indigena Yaxley's vicious hybrids in battle.
• Half-Human Hybrid - Acies (though through magical means), Jacinth, and Augusta Longbottom.
• Hates Being Touched - Harry.
• He Who Fights Monsters - Dumbledore.
• He's Just Hiding: As in canon, Regulus Black.
• Heel Face Turn - Several former Death Eaters.
• Heroic Sacrifice - arguably one of the main tropes in the series, both played straight and subverted on several occasions. Additionally, the entire seventh book is built on this trope.
• Honor Before Reason - several characters throughout the series, with possibly the best example being Indigena Yaxley.
• Humble Hero - Harry, taken to dark extremes.
  • He's so uncomfortable with taking credit for anything, that he's willing to use memory charms to make others believe they were the heroes; this is a consequence of his "training."
• I'm a Humanitarian - In a flashback, Evan Rosier is seen eating a child's heel.
• Infant Immortality - Brutally averted.
• Killed Off for Real - anyone who dies won't come back. The only time this isn't played straight is with the can on example of Regulus Black, who apparently didn't die in the first place.
• Light Is Good - The Light families in general. Arguably Harry himself whose ideals are closer to Light than Dark. The Light himself is much more decent and understandable than the wild Dark "The Dark does not care what its Lords do with its power, I do"
• Literary Allusion Title - the titles of most of the books are taken from Swinburne poems.
  • Also, many chapter titles reference everything from The Bible to Greek myth.
• Loads and Loads of Characters
• Magic Music - siren song comes loaded with compulsion, which Voldemort uses to his advantage near the end of the fifth book.
  • There's also Arabella Zabini, a Songstress who possesses the ability to create and dispel illusions and compulsions with her voice. She is even able to counteract the siren's song at one point to keep anybody from drowning themselves.
• Mama Bear - Puellaris witches will turn into lionesses to defend their children.
  • Laura Gloryflower is a Puellaris whose husband died. In order to continue living -as the trade off for Puellaris witches' power in the home spehere is that they give up all hope understanding of understanding things outside the home- she convinced herself to treat all the people of the world as her children. She is now head of her family, an old, powerful Light pureblood line.
  • Narcissa Malfoy would move mountains for Draco.
• Martyr Without a Cause - A particularly dark example. Harry has been so conditioned to devote and sacrifice himself for his brother that even after breaking free from the web he still repeatedly chooses to sacrifice himself for others, even when this possibly isn't the only option.
• Meaningful Name - Henrietta Bulstrode teaches Transfiguration under the name "Professor Belluspersona"; Belluspersona means "war disguise".
• Mood Whiplash - Chapter 66 of book 7 begins with Regulus's funeral, goes through some dramatic moments, and ends with a passionate interlude between Harry and Draco. True, it doesn't go from tragedy to comedy, but the latter half of the chapter lacks the gravitas of the first half.
• My Master, Right or Wrong - Indigena Yaxley to Lord Voldemort; she follows him out of honour but hates the fact that she has to kill people that she respects.
• Noodle Incident: Rufus Scrimgeour had one that involved involved a powerful illusionist, two cats, and green goo which is now the reason why the healers at St. Mungo's will only treat him for purely physical wounds.
• Our Vampires Are Different
• Our Werewolves Are Different
• Parental Betrayal - Lily in the third book.
• Polar Opposite Twins - Harry and Connor, in the early books: Connor is 'innocent,' spoiled, Light, and Gryffindor, while Harry is 'tainted' at least to Lily and Dumbledore, suicidally unselfish, Dark again, to Lily and Dumbledore, though he appears as such to most Light families - he's really a mix of the two, and Slytherin. But really that just touches the tip of the iceberg, and they become more sympathetic to each other as they get older.
• Pretentious Latin Motto - a number of pureblood families have Latin mottos. These include the Bulstrodes (Duramus - we endure), and the Yaxleys (Vita desinit, decus permanit - life is fleeting, glory remains).
• Prophecy Twist - and how.
• Pyrrhic Victory - although Harry survives, many people he loves, such as Regulus, Narcissa and Connor, do not make it.
• Relationship Reveal - pulled in-universe, when Harry reveals to a crowd of people that he and Draco are going through a joining ritual. (Of course, the reader and Harry's allies already know this.)
• Sacrificial Lion - Sylarana, at the end of the second book, which is the first truly important death.
• Shipper on Deck - quite a few characters ship Draco/Harry before anything actually happens between them.
• Silk Hiding Steel - The very definition of the Puellaris witches.
• Slash Fic - the main pairing (in later books) is Draco/Harry.
• Spot of Tea - Scrimgeour requires tea to function well; that said, he's the only (British) character who does, or is seen drinking it regularly. Doubles as his Trademark Favorite Food.
• The Stoic - both Harry and Snape have elements of this, although they both defrost a little (Harry more than Snape).
  • Not So Stoic - Oh boy, Snape has a massive one when Regulus dies, which results in Indigena Yaxley's gruesome death.
• Tag-Team Twins - the Yaxley brothers swap in and out of this reality.
• "Take That!" Kiss - Peridot Yaxley, a sex witch, to her sister Indigena in order to humiliate her. It works.
• Theme Naming - Some pureblood families and werewolf packs have this. The Parkinsons and Loki's werewolf pack have Floral Theme Naming, while the Yaxleys have Rock Theme Naming. The Starrises appear to take their names from characters in Shakespeare's works, as well.
• Theme Twin Naming - Oaken and Sylvan Yaxley.
• Triang Relations - Harry, Draco and Michael Rosier-Henlin have Type 4, with Draco and Harry as B and C respectively. Draco is aware of Michael's interest in him, and often intentionally leads him on. Of course, Harry is not pleased when he finds out.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting - multiple Animagi. As well as the ones mentioned in canon, Harry can turn into a lynx, Draco can turn into a white fox, and Connor can turn into a boar.
  • Honoria is a gull animagus.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Dumbledore, Lily, Falco Parkinson.
• Wham! Episode - the "Triple-Edged Blade" chapters at the end of A Song In Time Of Revolution radically change the story's landscape.
• What the Hell, Hero? - subverted; Harry tends to do this to himself, even when those around him point out that his actions were necessary and sometimes the only decent course of action he had
  • A notable example comes in one of the later books where Harry is forced to mercy-kill several innocent children because Voldemort will torture and do much worse to them otherwise
• Wild Magic - Confined magic can develop a personality, and the Light and the Dark are both sentient.
• Willing Channeler - the Smiths can be this for their ancestors.
• Wise Beyond Their Years - Harry.
• Yank the Dog's Chain - Regulus is romantically interested in Snape, so he's going to finally get his happy ending, right? Oh so wrong.