The Last Horcrux
By Bsum1
The burn of the fire was so close it nipped at his skin, the radiating glow a life form that scorched his pant legs and singed his eye sockets. He sat on the wing-back chair's arm rest, his broken down sneakers so close to the fire place that he feared his exposed toe would ignite. He didn't move though, simply pressing down further on his foot, to the point where he was almost standing, in an effort to deal with the pain.
Harry wondered if the… baby could feel the heat too, or if it was just too close to hell to notice. The skin itself was shrivelled like bruised peach, wrinkled and folded into layers of untold sins, each never quite long enough to cover the other. Harry was too horrified by the creature to even inspect its eyes. The lids were scrunched as the babe wailed and Harry wondered, if he pulled them apart, if there'd be anything there at all.
To think this thing had been a part of him for 16 years.
When harry had returned from death it had followed him. This grotesque cancer that had been a part of him since that Halloween night could not even be shaken by 'the next great adventure', and now, with Voldemort destroyed, there was only this wailing, demonic, festering, wailing… darkness…
Wailing
And the more he listened, the more it sounded like a frightened child. The baby was a tainted innocence. Harry remembered when Dumbledore had taken him through the memory of Bob Ogden. How the incestuous inbreeding had caused insanity in the line of Slytherins. Surely this had played a role in Voldemort's stage? Had Voldemort been a victim of circumstance? Had growing up parentless, in the environment of his child-hood built the setting of his globe theatre?
"I can't believe that," Harry whispered to himself, the baby's wails were so loud that his voice got swept away before it could reach his ears. "We were very much alike, you and I, yet we've both turned out so differently. I have to believe that, in the end, we both made our own decisions."
The baby choked and trembled in response.
"In the end we both decided who we wished to become." Harry chuckled grimly. "And despite that I still want to save you, even from yourself."
Harry sighed and reached over to the small table beside him. His fingers folded around a baby's bottle stolen from his godson, Teddy.
"Hermione was right. I do have a hero-complex."
The creature gurgled as the potion was forced down its throat.
"The dead are our responsibility, in a way. It's our job to take care of them."