PALE RIDER

Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters, I just like to dirty them up.

Chapter 1: Amortentia

When you average member of the British Wizarding world's newspaper-buying public thought of Harry Potter, an image came to mind of a boy considerably younger than Potter now was, very clean and neatly dressed in his Hogwarts uniform with a tie, looking brave and steadfast and clear-headed, with his unruly hair mussed only in the most wholesome of ways.

So it wasn't her fear that anyone would recognise the surly, drunken young man in need of a haircut with a three day old beard, dressed in muddy Levis, an old flannel shirt with holes in it and a ripped Rolling Stones tee shirt as Harry Potter, rather than the neighbours would talk about her getting a visit from such as disreputable person at all.

Harry pounded on the door, thunderously.

If he noticed the doors to the other flats in the hallway opening, he didn't care.

"C'mon, Rita, open the fucking door! I won't stand here all night, I'll take meself and me cock elsewhere! Who've you got in there? I'll beat him senseless an' make 'im watch me do a better job than he would! Rita! Rita!"

Rita Skeeter opened the door to her flat, and ushered Harry in.

She slammed the door behind him.

Harry tried to kiss her, and she smacked him in the chops.

He looked confused.

"Wot the fuck is your problem?" he asked.

"Don't you come over 'ere fucking stinking of cheap firewhiskey, drunk off your arse pounding on me door and cursing! I'm not about to lose me job and me flat over you, you fucking rotten little prick!" Rita yelled.

Harry looked sort of crestfallen at that, and for a moment Rita thought he might leave and she didn't want that.

For one thing, she was short of stories, this week.

For another, she was actually glad to see him.

Harry may well have been young, dumb and full of come, but, especially after her taking great pains to train him, he was a lot more fun than most blokes her own age.

And he had a lot more to work with.

And she had grown fond of the arrogant little sod.

"Don't look so upset, then, Harry. I don't want to get kicked out of the building, do I?"

Rita tried to make her smile a bit brighter, but the poor lad looked awful; like he hadn't slept for days.

Harry kicked off his trainers and slouched over to the couch and fell into it.

"Lemme sleep for awhile, Rita. I been up all night, at the Horntail's Nest, and I'm so tired."

"Why don't you go take a shower, and you can sleep in the bed?" she suggested.

"I dunno if I can make it." Harry admitted.

"Well, I'll help you, then, won't I?"

***

Harry wasn't sure how he really felt about Rita.

She pumped him for stories, and called him a rotten little prick when she got angry at him, and he knew she was a horrible person, but on the other hand she bought him liquor and washed his dirty clothes and cooked hot meals for him, and he knew if he couldn't go anywhere else there was her flat waiting.

She was literally old enough to be his mother, she had been a 6th year when Harry's Mum was a 7th year, but she was still a pretty good-looking woman in a hard and brassy sort of way, and she was a real blonde and her tits were not fake.

She was very red lipstick and film noir, like a road-company Barbara Stanwyck in the movies Uncle Vernon collected.

As for Rita, she had seduced Harry because she wanted the scoop and because he'd become quite a likely young devil, but she had ended up liking him quite in spite of herself. Harry was no goody-goody; he made no bones about liking to fuck, and drink, and fight, and he had an unexpected streak of sarcastic mean-spiritedness that a land shark like Rita found endearing.

And the poor lad was something of a lost soul; he needed a woman who wasn't a swooning foetus to look after him and show him what was what in life, after all.

They were both secretive people, living secret lives and each knew what the other's secrets were, and kept them.

For all her greediness to get scoops, after Harry became her source, she never printed a word about him that he didn't tell her he could, and never anything in an unflattering light.

Rita Skeeter, in fact was one of the reasons that not many people knew about Harry's devolution into addiction, alcoholism and thuggery. She had the goods on just about everybody in the publishing world, and if any of them knew what was good for them, they weren't going to publish one unflattering word about Harry Potter.

As for the Aurors, not only would it make it look bad in the Wizarding World if it became well known that their squeaky-clean saviour was frequently no better off or better behaved than your average thug on a streetcorner in Knockturn Alley, Rita had enough on highly placed Aurors and ministry members to keep them off Harry's back, as well.

It was the least she could do for him. Maybe he hadn't had his first drink or his first puff of pot in her flat, and maybe she should have waited until he was 16, even though he wasn't about to, and maybe it was the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that had led Harry to rack and ruin, but she still felt partially responsible for what had happened.

She put his muddy, bloody, sweat-smelling, puke-spattered clothes into a plastic bag and took them down to the laundry room.

When she came back, she opened a can and cut up some vegetables and some chicken and threw in a little extra broth and fixed Harry some soup.

Soup was about the only thing he could stomach, lately.

Then she put on her Hertz Rent-A-Face and went into the bedroom with a tray.

Harry had fallen asleep smoking in bed; she took the butt from his fingers and put it out and that woke him up.

"Eat your soup, Potter." she suggested.

After he ate his soup, Harry dropped off to sleep.

Rita remained awake after she cleaned up his dishes and put his clothes in the dryer and then folded them.

For fuck's sake, the lad was only 16 and he had already made a fucking wreck of himself. He had tracks all up and down his arms, he was skinny and grey-faced and he was hardly able to walk from one place to another, let alone to get it up. Increasingly he was at her door, looking for someone to take care of him, because who else did he have? His main girl was a year younger than he was, and the Killer Queen had some fairly large problems of her own, Harry being chief among them. Looking after him had almost gotten her killed.

But Rita Skeeter, who knew everyone's secrets, knew that there was somebody besides herself who would look after Harry, somebody who may not have known how badly off he was.

While Harry slept, Rita went to the building's owlery with a piece of parchment that would put the bite on Severus Snape.

She knew that he wouldn't tell.