A/N: Hey everyone! This was written for Rowena de Vandal's October 1000 Words or Less Challenge! If you like it, thank her! ;)
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It had been twenty long years since the downfall of Voldemort and the beginning of peace.
Harry thought back to how happy he was that day, the day he considered the best in his entire life, the day he had lived up to his "destiny."
He despised destinies now, for they left you empty once they had been fulfilled.
He was complete at seventeen. He had hit his pinnacle, the best he could possibly hope to be before he reached his twentieth birthday.
He wondered if it would have been better to die, to leave this world a martyr instead of a husk of what he once was. The rest of them didn't see the purposelessness left by being the only survivor in a family full of memories. His parents, his godfather, his mentors, his friends. So many gone, preserved as happy, smiling, loving, and always, always too young. He wondered if it were better to leave this world with "so much more to give" instead of a vacant shell with no potential. What more can you do when you've single handedly been lucky enough to stumble about and destroy evil? How do you give more than your own life, handed over, defeated, time and time again, only to be handed back to the land of the living with the threat that you are the world's only hope?
Harry was figuring out that you couldn't. There wasn't any love left in someone who had visited the place of the dead. He had tried; he had tried to love Ginny. He felt obligated to have a beautiful life, but when so much of what you do has been through a sense of duty, you don't have much motivation. No one told him it was his responsibility to care for her, and he found himself not in love. He found himself not caring when the Weasley family stopped sending post to Grimmauld Place, which he had decided to make his home. Hermione occasionally sent him a pleading letter to come back into civilization without Ron finding out, but Harry rarely read them. He knew he could never return to the Burrow, not without Fred there, and Bill's face full of scars, and Mrs. Weasley looking at him with iron in her stare.
He knew that Ron and Hermione married was too much for him to take; he preferred to think of them as school kids with a hidden feelings than as affectionate adults. He despised seeing his face in the mirror, no longer that of a child, but beginning to show time. He remained pale and thin, but instead of making him look fetching, he looked starved. The scar that had refused to fade over the years had shrunk slightly as his skin loosened, pulled away from his skull and wrinkled.
There was a tiny part of Harry that wanted war again. He wanted to feel useful.
And there was something else there, a nagging feeling.
He wanted to be important.
Importance had saved Harry from his own ego. He did little now but sit about and remember Hogwarts as it was when he attended--a safe place, but one with surprises under the stairs and a nasty lack of security when you know who's out there. Harry had never thought he would be yearning for Voldemort, but he found that hatred had been such a fundamental part of his being for so long that without something to focus it on, it curdled inward and poisoned him.
Even Kreacher avoided him now.
Harry found solace in the echoing tinny of thin walls and bare cupboards in the Black household. Without some larger menace, a comforting home was suffocating. He felt Mrs. Black's eyes on the back of his head, the disapproval of the house as it shrank away from his touch. It pleased him to threaten the house, he was used to similar sentiments from the Slytherins all through school.
But really, wondered Harry, was it the Slytherins? Snape had been the perpetrator of much of Harry's schooltime torment, and in the end he had not been evil at all. Things were not as black and white as they seemed, Harry reasoned. Or as red and gold as they seemed. His own father had been quite the bully once, but his sins were forgiven with an early death. Sirius thought a murderer and an escaped convict, absolved by demise.
The only black and white in the world is death. But even that was not entirely true, for hadn't Harry's life been taken many times?
No, Harry thought. It had been given many times.
He would have to steal his life, swipe it when none were looking.
Harry made his way to the kitchen, shuffled through the various instruments Kreacher had proved quite adept at using to create all sorts of culinary delights, and settled on a rather large knife.
He would have to do this the Muggle way for it to work.
The fingers that had once grasped the Elder wand closed around the handle of the butcher knife and shoved deep, deep into destiny.
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