A/N: So, this is an excuse to try some rather dark stuff out for the An Uncertain Goddess arc. Nothing more, so excuse the flimsy plot and general strangeness. I can't and won't promise my Harry will actually get this dark—frankly, I hope he won't, other than the potential punishment for Fenrir of course.Sort of an after thought, this is gory.
Ever since Sirius had died, Harry had been strange. He had spent the time between the Department of Mysteries and the end of term hidden. He would walk down with the others to breakfast, always silent, and then slip off as soon he finished his food. The very first time, Ron and Hermione had tried to find him, walking all over the castle.
The Room of Requirement?
Empty.
The transfiguration classroom?
Empty.
The passageway to Honeydukes, the Shrieking Shack, the charms room?
Empty, empty, empty.
They searched every empty classroom they came across, but still no Harry.
“Wait,” Hermione reached for Ron's arm, “He...he probably needs to be alone right now.” She gave him a thin smile, “He'll come to us when he's ready to talk.”
Ron nodded and raked a hand through his hair, “I worry for him.”
“I know,” she bit her lip, “me too. But he needs this, and we have to do it for him.”
Ron nodded and he followed her, leaving behind the sun flooded hallways.
Something in Harry had snapped. Merlin knew what it was, but there it was, in all its crazy glory. Who was he to complain?
The last day of term, Harry seemed almost manically cheerful. When Hermione gingerly asked to talk about Sirius, he just chirped something about getting on with his life and that Sirius wouldn't want him to spend all his time mourning.
The Order made the predictable threat to the Dursleys, who blustered and puffed about it. Petunia made a sour, angry face at Remus in particular. Merlin knew why. The poor man hadn't actually done anything, after all.
On the trip home, Harry contemplated the blood wards that were supposed to protect him. They required that he be at Privet Drive for two weeks and that Petunia be on the premises, and presumably, that she was alive.
Hm.
Harry patiently tolerated the usual crap from his relatives for two weeks—the chores, the starvation, the bullying—and, exactly two weeks after arriving at Privet Drive, he did what he thought was a most interesting experiment with the wards.
Idly, he sauntered into the kitchen during breakfast.
Vernon looked up with a snarl, “Boy, why aren't you in the garden!”
They had stopped asking him to cook after Dudley—and only Dudley—got violently sick from tuna casserole after he had beaten Harry.
Harry didn't respond, instead he pulled out his wand and petrified the three of them. “I'm quite done with you.”
Harry tilted his head as he stared at Dudley. “Gluttony is a sin, you know. So is greed. A pound of flesh, I think. And then some trimming up. You could use it.” Walking around the table, Harry proceeded to slice vertically through pounds of fat, blood streaming down onto the tile and stains blooming like Rochart's blots on his jersey and jeans. Tears of pain oozed out of Dudley's eyes. Harry paused to examine the phenomenon. He supposed it made sense—the heart of a petrified person didn't stop beating so it made sense that other internal functions wouldn't either. He shrugged.
Leaving Dudley to bleed to death in his donut of flesh, he turned to Petunia, who desperately wanted to scream and flee and save her little boy. Of course, she was petrified and couldn't even change her facial expression.
“You know, you're indirectly the cause of most of the misery in my life. You could have at least fed me properly and given me a room. You went out of your way to hurt me and fucked up your son in your attempt to spite my mother—who was dead, mind you, and couldn't appreciate it. He's never going to make it on his own, you know. And what would he have done if he survived you?” He narrowed his eyes at her, “I need you alive anyway, but you get to watch. Enjoy the show.”
With that he turned to Vernon. “You were the worst, I think. Can't say I hate you the most—that dubious honor is a tie between your wife and Voldemort—but you were the worst. You systematically abused a child for something he couldn't help. Can't squash nature, you know.”
A mad smile slid across Harry's face, “Magic. Magic! Magicmagicmagicmagicmagicmagic.” The boy grinned again. “Hope you enjoyed that.” He stepped back and tilted his head from side to side, “I'm not feeling particularly creative at the moment.” He pointed a blasting spell at Vernon's face, showering the wall behind him with gore as his head exploded in a cloud of blood. Slivers of Vernon's skull slid down the wall, clicking softly as they touched the base board.
An owl tapped at the window. From the Ministry no doubt. Harry expected to be expelled and didn't particularly feeling like stopping what he was doing.
He reached out to Petunia's face and gently closed her eyes halfway, before shredding her skin and casting a stasis spell to keep her alive. Grabbing his broom, invisibility cloak, and some of Dudley's dark-colored cast offs, he rocketed out of the backyard. Harry didn't expect the Order to even wonder about anything for a couple days. When there were absolutely no signs of life, they might investigate, but not before then.
It was the third day after Harry killed the Dursleys that the Order investigated. Surreptitiously opening the door, Remus, Tonks, and Snape crept into the house.
“What on earth is that smell?” asked Tonks, covering her nose with her clothed forearm.
“Blood,” Snape said. Peeking into the kitchen, he gasped. “Search upstairs,” he ordered the others, looking a bit green.
“What's wrong?” asked Remus quickly, worried. He couldn't imagine what might make Severus Snape turn green.
“Everything. Go upstairs.”
Remus, looking worried to the point of being frantic, scooted upstairs with Tonks to search the upstairs.
It looked like the occupants had simply disappeared, like they had been lifted out daily life. There was laundry waiting to be folded sitting on a bed, a video game paused in the middle of a fight, a half-folded newspaper on the bedside table.
Looking into what he knew to be Harry's room, it was the same. Clothes strewn about, a book half read, homework on the desk with an open bottle of ink sitting next to it. On top of the homework, sat an envelope. Worried, he moved forward to pick it up. A ransom note? A letter from You-Know-Who?
On the outside of the envelope, in Harry's crisp, jagged handwriting were the words, You, Whoever You Are. He cracked it open carefully and read the note.
Hi,
I have no idea who's going to find this, or when, but I'm sorry. I think. Not for the Dursleys, of course, but for you and the Order and Ron and Hermione. Mostly for the Weasleys, Hermione, and Remus, I think. Last of his connection to his past and his friends, gone stark raving mad. Murderously mad.
Not dark, just mad, I promise.
I'm sorry.
Love,
Harry
Oh dear. This was why Snape had looked green. What had Harry done?
A wretch and a splat announced someone vomiting on the floor. Remus hurried downstairs and saw Tonks on her hands and knees, dry heaving over a pool of vomit. Snape met his gaze.
Striding past Snape before he could explain, Remus nearly slipped in a puddle of congealed blood.
Oh my god!
Harry's cousin was slumped forward, quite literally encircled in his own fat. Some of it slipped up against the pale skin that it had been once connected to, a red and white band of fat and flesh around his middle. The child was white faced; he had bled to death and blood ringed and blossomed around his chair like a nebula.
The body of the uncle had tumbled off the chair it once sat on, headless with a spray of gore on the wall behind the seat. The blood had oozed down the pale and flowery wallpaper to collect on the floor below, dried into the wood by the noon-tide sun. There was a large black stain of blood near the shoulders of what had been Vernon Dursley.
Petunia was, in a way, the worst. Unseeing eyes fluttered in the ruins of her face as she slumped back into her chair. She had been peeled of her skin in one piece, like an apple, and it curled around waist, leaving tissue and muscle exposed. A fly sat on one red and white breast and cleaned its eyes, mindlessly buzzing. Blood was still dripping on to the floor from the hem of her skirt and the seat of her chair. A thin but steady stream of it curled around the wooded legs. It had been her blood he had almost slipped in.
Hm. Potions was finally useful, he thought as he absently carved doodles and runes and slogans into the flesh of Fenrir Greyback. Every letter and symbol was etched deeply into the skin as his victim arched and wailed in pain, caused both by the knife and the steel-silver alloy that made up the chains that held him. “Quit wiggling!” he scolded the man beneath his knife, “you're making things difficult!”
Rolling his eyes when Fenrir squealed as Harry carved over his spine, Harry eyed the crucible that held the silver and lead mixture and stood up to check its progress, putting down the knife and moving away from the table. Greyback collapsed, gasping and wheezing. The chains weren't as bad as the knife, he decided, wincing as sweat oozed into a carving. Turning to watch his captor and torturer, he saw Harry pick up a piece of piping and siphon a long draft of whatever it was in the white-hot crucible. The boy moved back and separated a wound with long fingers. The burning liquid cauterized the cuts and then a greater fire lit his skin. Silver!
When he was done, Harry dumped the body at the Ministry. Where else could he put it? No where, he supposed.
Voldemort looked at the corpse with horrified fascination. That mess of silver and lead and charred flesh had once been a perfectly good minion. Rumor had it that Potter did it, he wasn't so sure. Reaching across the link, he found that the boy was sleeping and tried to examine his mind. It was like swimming through muck and trying to avoid the rocks at the bottom of a waterfall. He was assaulted by fragments of memories and thoughts. Many of them burned as they streaked across his mind—who love thing, he supposed—while others sang out to him with fury, anguish, and guilt. Some of them, more recent memories and thoughts he thought, had no particular emotion associated with them. Sort of a blind calm.
Oh. There was a tinge of pride and righteous vengeance in that memory clip of Greyback, but no more.
He withdrew, unable to tell anything more then that it was indeed Potter who murdered his minion.
Remus felt sick as he listened to a report on the murder of Fenrir Greyback. They thought it might have been him who had attacked Remus as a child, but no one deserved what had happened to him. No one. A part of him suspected that this was partly vengeance on his behalf, but he ruthlessly quashed such thoughts.
Over the coming weeks, the Order, the Death Eaters, and the Ministry all frantically searched for the sixteen year-old Harry Potter without success. Harry roamed, never staying in one place for long. With stealth and cunning that few thought possible from him, he struck down each member of the Inner Circle, leaving only Severus Snape alive.
Bellatrix LeStrange, her husband, and brother-in-law had all been found in separate rooms of the Department of Mysteries, brutally strangled.
Lucius Malfoy—or what they thought was him—was found in a melted puddle on his foyer floor. His wand and cane were found nearby in a potted plant.
Augustus Rookwood had been found in his sitting room, a macabre mockery of a dissection.
Antonin Dolohov had been made into a blood eagle, his back cut open and his ribs cracked to make wings of flesh and bone. They followed the trail of blood and discovered his lungs in a bathroom sink.
Snape received a letter.
Snape,
I think you may actually be Order, so I think I won't drown you in a boiling cauldron.
Enjoy.
Potter
He was stunned and furious and sneering all at once. He shoved the letter in Dumbledore's face with contempt. “Look what your golden boy sent me!”
Dumbledore looked weary and sad.
Remus was patrolling an area rumor had it that Harry was frequenting, only to find himself petrified and gently leaned against a wall.
“Hi Remus. I really am sorry. I miss you. I'm going to hide you someplace safe and comfortable. The spell will wear off in three hours. I can't really have you after me. I have a few more things to do.” Harry looked a little confused and awkward, his movements stilted and clumsy.
He was levitated to a glen in a nearby wood and Harry posed him in a sitting position before placing him on the ground between two enormous roots of an ancient oak. He hugged Remus briefly. “I really am sorry and I miss you.” He searched the golden eyes before him for a moment, looking far more lucid then they had moments before, “I wish you the best in the post-Voldemort world.” The boy gently tapped the top of Remus' head so he could blink properly, and disappeared.
“He looked lucid, towards the end, Headmaster,” Remus said as he slouched over the table at Grimmauld Place, “But before that, he looked utterly disconnected. Like he was talking and thinking around a block. Jumbled.”
Snape sneered, “Potter was never known for being all together.”
Remus shot him a glare, but said nothing. Dumbledore took over, “Enough, Severus. Enough.”
With all his inner circle gone, Voldemort wasn't hard to find. All Harry had to do was follow a few people and slip in behind them. Creeping along in the shadows with his invisibility cloak, he watched with keen eyes as Voldemort yelled and tortured his underlings. They skittered along the black marble floor like beetles, trying desperately to escape the lash and fire of Voldemort's wrath. Severus Snape was called forward, questioned, and found inadequate. He was held up a crucio spell for upwards of a minute before Harry whispered the Killing Curse and Voldemort toppled dead from his throne of obsidian, scraping down the pumice stair steps. With another whispered curse, Harry ended his own life, collapsing in the corner.
He was found in a crumpled ball sometime later, an ankle sticking out from under the cloak. In his pocket, there was a letter.
Hi.
I don't know who's going to find me—Death Eaters or the Order. Doesn't really matter. But hopefully both Voldemort and myself are dead.
Remus, take my cloak, assuming you are willing to have it. If not, so be it.
To Ron, my broom, which you will find stashed in a hollow tree in Parish Wood, near Surrey.
To Hermione and the rest, I don't think I have anything any of you really want, but you're welcome to divvy up my possessions, such as they are. I love you.
Please cremate me.
I'm sorry.
Love,
Harry