Harry shivered in his thin threadbare rags that hung from his emancipated body, doing nothing to protect him from the everlasting cold. His skin was pale from lack of sunlight and his lips blue from the cold. His hair was long past his shoulders to almost the small of his back, midnight black that looked blue in the small amount of moonlight that poured through the high and very small window. It was dirty and matted but less tangled and wild than it had been when it was shorter. He'd been here for six going on seven years. He was twenty-four now and over half of his life had been spent in one form of hell or another.
He chuckled, a cold, and slightly wet chuckle tinged with the beginnings of madness and it echoed through his cell. His chuckles quickly turned to racking coughs and then once more into shivers as a dementor glided through his cell door. Their negative empathy and feeding habits didn't affect him near as much as they used to; a result of all his memories now being fully accessible to his conscious mind, as well as the dementors own efforts in shielding their auras around him. These things did nothing to stop the cold however.
The dementors had started shielding him after he told them the truth of his story and allowing them to view his memories. He realized early on that they seemed to be speaking a heavily accented dialect of Parseltongue and he attempted to communicate. The dementors were the ones to alert him to the many memory blocks his mind seemed to hold and also offered their assistance in removing them. As they were natural born masters in the mind arts he quickly agreed. He still remembered that day. It was the day he stopped believing that those he once called friends or even family were coming to save him.
He had been arrested only hours after the Battle for Hogwarts was over. He couldn't even remember what the original charges were but he'd been gone with the Aurors quietly tired of fighting and believing that he would stay in the ministries cells until both Hogwarts and the Ministry was cleaned up and then the accusations would be proven false in a trial of his peers. But his name was Harry Potter and he should have known he'd be screwed over.
He never made it to the ministry cells and never got a trial. He'd been sent directly to Azkaban with two lovely new silver accessories on his upper arms inhibiting him from being able to access his magic. At the time he'd believed that those he'd called friends would work to get him released and if not then they would break him out. He wasn't completely wrong. Neville and Luna along with a few more members of the former DA and surprisingly three Slytherins; Zabini, Nott, and Malfoy tried to break him out about a year and a half into his stay. The dementors had already helped him unlock his memories at this point and Harry wasn't surprised that none of the Weasely's and Granger were absent and took no part in the rescue operation. The group had been caught just outside his cell where they set off a second alarm that had been set on his cell door; apparently someone suspected that a rescue operation would occur and was making sure it wouldn't succeed.
Neville and Luna as the leaders had been subject to the dementors kiss along with the three Slytherins. Hannah Abbott, Susan Bones, Dean Thomas, and Seamus Finnegan ended up with secure cells a floor above him as Ronald Weasely took great pleasure in informing him a few days after the attempt.
He ignored the red headed weasel even as he imagined tearing the traitorous bastard to pieces with his bare hands before ripping his throat out with his teeth. Many of his blocked memories were of Harry catching him and Granger spying and stealing from him as well as helping several Weasely's drug him with potions into falling in love with their bitchy skank of a little sister before being obliviated by Molly or more often Dumbledore.
His unblocked memories also showed him being obliviated by Dumbledore after the man bound up portions of his magic and abilities after he used wandless magic to fight against his relative's cruelty. There were even memories that he himself had subconsciously placed behind blocks; memories of Vernon Dursley beating him almost to death after large bouts of accidental magic when he was quite young. All in all Harry knew he had been played like a puppet on strings for the majority of his short life before being thrown away as a no longer needed weapon, a liability.
He shivered again as the dementor, Ruska moved closer to him. The dementors had taken it upon themselves to keep him as sane as possible by providing companionship and the years as they were a very long lived race to teach him things. He learned about various subjects, magical theory, several different languages, politics and finance. Sporadically he learned about Ancient History and the Ancient Rites from one of the three elder dementors Caius, Garlan, and Ruska.
Today he was too cold, too tired to do much more than bow his head in respect at the old dementor. He was getting weaker and weaker every day. The dementors had told him that Magic and Earth were dying and the entire world would soon die with them. The old dementor told Harry that the muggles were killing Mother Earth while the majority of magicals took from Lady Magic without giving her anything in return and slowly but surely she too was dying. In a generation, perhaps maybe two if she didn't give up and fought to the end not a single magical child would be born. Soon enough the Lady would be forever gone and Mother would follow shortly behind.
The dementors also showed him many memories from various death eaters of Tom Riddles original goals when he was still the political leader of the Knights of Walpurgis a faction of the Dark Party. With the information Harry knew of Horcrux's and Tom Riddle's persona of Lord Voldemort Harry came to the conclusion that before Lord Voldemort the Dark Side had been saving magic. Two; Tom Riddle's loss of sanity was most likely a result of having less than half a soul after his second Horcrux ritual and three; none of it mattered because Voldemort was dead and he and Magic were both following behind him.
He coughed a wretched wet cough as his breathing slowly became more difficult. Ruska floated closer, boney, skeletal hands catching Harry's head as his body gave out and he could no longer sit up. Harry fought to take each breath, pain spiking through his chest as the lack of oxygen in his blood made his heart contract painfully. He looked up into the dark cowl of Ruska above him and whispered with the last of his breath,
"I'm ready to go now, please make the pain go away, kiss me." Ruska lowered her head down and placed her mouth upon his and sucked his soul free. Without swallowing she placed his body down gently on the floor, and released his soul from her mouth. It floated in front of her for a moment before winking away.
"Be forever free now little one," she said before floating off to tell the rest of here people that Harry Potter had passed on.
On July thirty first two thousand four the Wizarding World watched in surprise as a procession of dementors carried the dead body of Harry Potter with hoods lowered and glistening black tears on their skeletal faces as they shielded their auras from the Wizarding Population. They carried the body of a pallet of pure obsidian. They had quite obviously prepared the body themselves before bringing it. The emancipated body was dressed in a fresh and beautiful black dementor's cloak lined with silver threaded runes with his hands crossed and folded together on his chest as well as a silver and obsidian circlet picked with small glittering emeralds upon his head. The procession, Harry's dress, and his body itself whit long washed and brushed midnight black hair splayed upon the stone pallet, combined with extremely pale skin, bruised blue lips, and child-like stature made Harry look like a fallen child prince. The Wizarding World in Diagon Alley watched on as the dementors performed an honor guard till the Aurors used patroni to chase them away.
The Wizarding World wouldn't know till days later that at Harry's last breath, Lady Magic perished as she mourned give the last of her reserves to Father Death in order to send his master to the past to try better. She hoped he would succeed as she gasped and burst into golden dust and dissolved into nothingness. Across the world magical creatures began fading, disappearing in droves as the magic to support their existence burned dry.
Next went the magical plants and with them both gone came the potion shortages. Slowly but surely the Wizarding Population began dropping as they began getting sick magic draining from them. Those with creature blood dying first as the rest followed. Wards broke down and muggles discovered the race of dying magicians and began to exterminate the last of them.
In three months, less than a hundred days anything with magic was dead and gone. Mother Earth gave up days later. By the year 2025 the earth was a dead dust filled planet, one of many in the vast universe as it revolved around the sun, only a single chunk of obsidian glinting brightly and dust free surrounded by the broken, and sand filled half collapsed buildings of what used to be London.
Harry came back into consciousness in the dark. It was warm and comfortable for a moment before he was suddenly being pushed towards the only spot of brightness in the darkness. He didn't want to go, but he could do nothing to stop it as walls seemingly closed in around him, contracting, and pushing him forward.
"Just a little further Lily, I can see his head. Just push a little more," said a male voice. A second voice sounded just a little further away as if someone was peeking from a doorway.
"Is he here yet? Lily stopped shouting." Harry recognized that voice, it was Sirius; what was Sirius doing here? The realization hit him quickly, he was being born. With that thought he absolutely wanted out now and would willingly allow someone to obliviated him of this moment. There were some things a man shouldn't remember and one's birth was one of them. Lily's voice answered Sirius's.
"Oh fuck you! Fuck all of you, cock-sucking, shite-eating mother fucking sons of goats!" she screamed as she pushed.
"Come on Padfoot," Harry heard Lupin say and footsteps away from the room. Harry could hear the nurse and healers tell his mother to push harder with James pitching in every once in a while. Harry felt his head slip free as his father told his mother to push a little harder.
"Push harder?! Push harder?! When this is over I am going to fucking castrate you bastard," Lily screamed as Harry slipped free of the birthing canal. Suddenly hands were on him a cloth rubbing him vigorously and he couldn't help but cry. His father clipped his umbilical cord and he was wrapped up in a warm towel before being set in his mother's arms.
He looked up at the sweaty form of his mother looking down at him with love in her eyes and wanted to cry so he did before passing out in exhaustion.
Harry's next few weeks were a mixture of breast feeding, which he mentally added to his list of things he wanted obliviated from his mind, shitting his pants, crying because he shit his pants, being unable to stop crying, and then passing out. He was unable to move on his own other than to roll over or sometimes grab his own feet. He couldn't speak to his parents and his magic was too far out reach for him to try and use it to speak to his parents. He decided that whatever forces had sent him back didn't seem to be trying to communicate with him so he was going to go about his life, but do it better this time.
The inevitable happened. His parents went into hiding two weeks before All Hallows Eve. He did everything he could to convince his parents that Pettigrew was untrustworthy. His magic began acting up, although nothing he tried worked the way he wanted it to. It was pure accidental magic, reacting to his emotions, not his intentions. Although he was particularly pleased when he trapped the rat in his animagus form and his mother's familiar, a feline named Quasimodo chased him around for an hour.
The only bad thing about his accidental magic was that it caught the attention of Dumbledore. Dumbledore cast several spells over Harry to test his magic. Dumbledore's magic oozed over Harry's awareness and Harry hated it. Harry glared at the man so hard, that his white beard was actually set on fire. It was put out quickly unfortunately and Harry passed out from exhaustion but it was pleasing none the less.
The evening came almost by surprise, even though Harry was waiting for it. As had happened from his old memories his father fell first as his mother raced with him up the stairs. Unlike his memories of the old timeline however this time Harry registered everything that occurred. He watched as his mother set him in his crib before biting her thumb and rubbing the blood from the wound onto a hidden rune carved into the dark wood.
"My life given freely for the protection of another, my blood spilled for the safety of theirs, by life, blood, and love I bind this shield, so mote it be," Lily whispered turning around as the nursery door was blasted open.
"He heard his mother plead for mercy and refuse to move aside. Now however he knew that she wanted Voldemort to murder her so that he shield would be raised. Soon she was satisfied as the deadly green light struck her and she lie, splayed out on the nursery floor red hair like liquid silk, pillowed around her.
The man looking nowhere near as 'snaky' as the last time Harry saw him. In fact he looked like a handsome man in his late forties much like the dementors showed him he looked before his initial fall. Voldemort moved forward stepping lightly over Lily's body on the floor to stand in front of the crib. The man looked down at Harry in the crib and spoke.
"And to think, you will never know the part in my victory you have played." Harry gazed up at the man, not with the anger he thought he would have but rather with pity, all the pity he could muster in his tiny body was displayed in his eyes as the green light struck his face and he passed out.
When Harry came back to consciousness he was in Hagrid's arms. He mentally cursed. Now he would be unable to stop Sirius from chasing after the rat. Hagrid, gently for his size set Harry down into the side car of his motorbike and quickly took off into the air. Harry once more fell asleep as the engine rumbled and purred rythmetically. He woke up once more as Hagrid landed and realizing where he was quickly shut his eyes feigning that he was still asleep.
He listened to the three adults speak as they set him on the doorstep he wanted to curse Dumbledore. The man knew exactly what he was subjecting him too, in the original timeline he'd paid for it even. Well technically Harry had paid for it given that it was coming from his own accounts that he hadn't remembered having until after the dementors had unlocked his memories and there was no way in hell he would willingly allow himself to be subject to such hell again.
This time around he wouldn't be lead around like a dog on a leash. This time he would be ready for what the Wizarding World threw at him. This time he was going to do it all his way and no one would be able to stop him even if he decided he wanted to save magic by burning the world down and starting anew from the ashes.