The Fruit That Ate Itself

Disclaimer: Harry Potter is the creation of J.K. Rowling, and I've just adapted it for my own purposes.

A/N: This is also posted on under the penname . Who just so happens to be me. And since I am accustomed to writing for all of my chapters will be near 3,000 words long (except for , which is more like 7,000. I may be posting that in sections).

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"Well you know what? Fuck the Ministry! It's just out to take my money. And you know what? FUCK THE WORLD!"

Fred's having another episode. They happen about as regularly as I steal money from someone, which is to say he erupts like clockwork. He's never really gotten over losing his business to the Depression of 2010, about four years ago, when profits abated but taxes didn't. He goes out to the main square every day with the rest of the protestors, who're still rallying for financial aid, not that the Ministry gives as long as they've got something to cover their arses with.

I swear he's out there every day, rain or shine or super-soakers full of piss. I kid you not, he stood there and campaigned while some punk little upstart squirted him. Of course, Fred beat the crap out of the guy about three seconds after, and then came home and showered and changed, but nevertheless that takes devotion. But that would be Fred Weasley, I guess.

You might be wondering why Voldemort didn't take advantage of the Depression and wreak havoc, but while he may not be human, all his supporters are. When it became clear he couldn't supply them with money—I mean come on, do you really think wizard banks can't tell when money's forged?—they up and left. Since the Ministry wasn't going to expend valuable income on them that could better be spent cushioning their own fall, the Death Eaters crumbled, and now there aren't any more left.

Well, that's what they think. Oh, if only I could—if it wouldn't get the shit beaten out of me by my fellow Death Eaters—I'd love to bare my forearm and shove it in their secure little faces. I count down each day until we patrol the streets like we own the place, which we practically do already. They just don't know it yet.

Fred's been reduced to chanting "FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU" over and over again, so I figure it's time to go out and get him. Death Eater or not, I know the meaning of loyalty. No, screw that, I know the meaning of mortification. With my bright red hair there's absolutely no way I can walk down the street and not be chalked up as a Weasley, and in 2014 there's only one other Weasley left. That would be the current maniac who's tearing at his scalp and littering hair all over the place and bellowing at the top of his lungs. I have a reputation to uphold, and it does not involve being known as the son of the village idiot.

"C'mon, Pop," I say as I wrap an arm around his torso and drag him back to our house. It's quite convenient, don't you think, that we live about ten meters from the main square and consequently the 'temporary' Ministry HQ, which was set up five years ago and doesn't show any signs of being removed, seeing as it's made of (faux) marble and all.

Maybe I forgot to mention our house is a cardboard box. It's spacious enough because, well, duh—we're magic. It has all the regular commodities: shower (drain water from the buildings above, rain, whatever, as long as we get clean), two beds (sleeping bag sheared in two), and practically even a stove (Merlin knows the asphalt gets hot enough). Still, forgive me if I sound selfish, but it's not exactly a five-star hotel. For example, while Ye Olde Refrigerator Box is waterproofed, raw eggs still smell like shit when they're three days old.

I grunt as I throw Fred down on his half of the sleeping bag and knock him unconscious with my wand. Yeah, I pretty much own Fred's ass. You'd be surprised how easy it is to stay in shape even without a gym or a phys ed program or anything. There's a gym at school, but you've got to be a student and at fourteen I decided I was wasting my time. Yeah, that's right, I survived up until fourth year and then I split. Are you going to hold that against me? 'Cause if so, you really ought to fuck off.

You also might be wondering how I got my wand. It doesn't work as well as it ought to—it's not like I can waltz down to a wand shop and have my pick. For one thing, Earth to reader, I live in a cardboard box. With inflation, wands these days are like ninety Galleons if you get them on the black market. No, my mates and I go down to the dump every other month or so and see if there're any wands that like us better than our old ones. It's not always a perfect match, but we live with what we've got.

With Fred out of the way, I cast a botched locking spell around Yorb, which is what I call Ye Olde Refrigerator Box. Better than Elohtihs Ruo, which is what my mate Caleb Zabini's christened his pile of boxes. Have I mentioned yet that compared to everyone else in the Death Eater business, the Zabinis are rich as shit? (Which translates to they've got a box per family member.)

Across the street, a fellow hobo's singing old Weird Sisters tunes—think of them as the Nirvana of the wizarding world—as poorly as he can to see if someone will pay him to shut up, which still isn't going to earn him any more than a few jinxes. Guys like him never learn that the only way to get money is to take it by force. Prime example:

Me, giving a young yuppie-in-the-making my toothpaste ad smile: Hey, kid, you got any money?

Kid: Er . . . uh, no?

Me: Hey, kid, got any money?

Kid: Well, yeah, but my mum—

Me: Your mum can go to hell.

Kid: I've got a wand! I know how to hex—

Me, with a Silencio and a Levicorpus, neither of which work nearly as well as they should thanks to my crap wand: Thanks for the money.

I'm very polite when I relieve people of a couple Sickles, which will buy me some illegal firewhiskey if I know the right places to go. But I don't feel like showing my face any time soon—thanks a ton, Pop. You know how much I love you.

I don't know why I don't dye my hair. Maybe it's because chicks recognize me by my red head. Maybe it's because I'm secretly very vain and the only way I can think of is calligraphy ink, which would do a botched job of it. And maybe it's because I've got better things to do, like sit on my ass and stare at the ricockulous mess I call the world.

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"Weasley, I want him dead by four o'clock this morning. Next week is waiting too long."

"Yes, Master," I say, and then Voldemort—yeah, I have absolutely no qualms about using his name in my head; so I'm not loyal enough? Bite me—nods and I back away on my knees. He moves on to discussing something else not nearly as important, and as I half-listen I plan how I'm going to neutralize the Minister's secretary.

I bet you wouldn't guess that the houseless cynic with the maniac dad also puts the 'ass' in 'Voldemort's top assassin,' did you? Things are not what they seem. I'm a prime example. At seventeen, I'm already "Our Great Dark Lord's" top pick to off great political figures. That might have something to do with the fact that while you get twenty Galleons—a decent amount—if you do the job right, if you screw up you don't get anything but death. But I prefer to call it talent.

"Weasley, your eyes can stop glazing over in fake reverence now; we're done." Caleb smacks me on the side of my head in a brotherly way. Head ringing, I slap his butt and Apparate back home to check on Fred. He's still out, so I figure it's okay to stop by Soma's, which is where I know Caleb will be.

The entrance fee at Soma's is three quarters of what I beat out of the kid earlier this afternoon, and the only reason it's not more is that they charge three quarters of what you have on you at the moment, no matter if it's a Sickle (anything less and you'll be laughed away) or forty Galleons. The owner, James Cohen, figures people'll use the last quarter to buy drinks, and hell is he right.

Soma's is the type of place you need to be buzzed to enjoy—the female entertainment is less than top notch, but when you've got your beer goggles on . . . let's stick with I'm about yay close to getting lucky when Caleb smacks me across the face and reminds me I've got a job to do. We've got a very physical relationship, and I don't care what connotations that's got as long as I don't catch shit about it.

My 'job' involves making sure Fred's out lobbying again, locking up Yorb because you never know who's desperate enough to steal from the town maniac and his tough-as-hell son (okay, so that's what I'd like to imagine people think of me as), and hauling ass out to the Minister's secretary's house. It's ricockulously easy to sneak in, as I've found out on earlier occasions when I was preparing for the job.

Since the secretary comes home at about 2:45 AM and it's only 2:15, I figure I've got time enough. I situate myself in the closet between his wife's clogs and her stilettos—like I said, the Ministry doesn't give what we're doing as long as they're living in luxury—so that I can see and hear out the crack in the door. The closet's pitch dark, and as always I light up my wand and search everywhere for spiders. Top assassin or not, I can't stand them. Yorb is entirely bug-free, mostly due to me calling in a few favors with blokes who have better wands than I do.

Once I've finished checking out the closet I let my wand go dim and make myself comfortable. I can't afford to let my limbs fall asleep—to stumble when I first burst out would be to sign my own death sentence. I end up thinking about politics to get myself worked up for the moment when my anger really matters; when it's all up to me who goes: my victim or me.

For one thing, just sitting in this lady's closet is pissing me off. She's got suede shoes, and the hem of a fur coat—real fur, mind you—is tickling my forehead. Why are these people living like the Depression never happened, when my mates and I are calling cardboard boxes home? Even, say, running water would be a nice contribution, but no—I'm stuck shitting in the gutter while the Minister's secretary has his own porcelain shrine to the toilet god, complete with air freshener for when it gets smelly. Where's the justice in that, I ask you?

Don't think I'm getting emotional. I know how much that could cost me. That's why I don't even know the Minister's secretary's name. I'll have no way to relate to him. I know what he looks like by heart—dark skin, dark hair that looks like dreadlocks buzzed short, and a short, stout profile—and that's good enough for me. One of the previous top assassins tried to neutralize some guy who was getting a gang together that was large enough to challenge the Death Eaters, only he had the same name as the assassin's mum—don't ask me how that works; I've met guys named Leslie and Ashley before, and birds called Connor and Jordan, but this guy's mum's name was Kelly—and to cut a long story short, he couldn't do it 'cause he felt like he was smoking his mum. From then on, we're on a strictly no-name basis with the people we're supposed to eliminate.

"Honey, I've just got to change my shoes—AAIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE‼"

Shit, it looks like the secretary and his wife are going out to a late night party rather than going to bed like I thought. If I can't fix this right away, I'm going to be as alive as the animals that went into making the secretary's wife's fur coat.

I burst out of the closet, wand raised, and bellow "SECTUSEMPRA!" Cuts sprout across the chest of the woman who discovered me, ruining her silk dress robes, which serves her right. I'd kill her on the spot, but my real goal's the secretary and my wand's only got so much in it before it gives out.

"Petronella! PETRONELLA, ARE YOU OKAY?!" The secretary, a heavy-set man, pounds up the stairs, wand drawn. He sees me and instantly recognizes my hair, and I think 'If I screw this up, Fred's going to have hell to pay,' and add that to the Con side of my mental Pro-Con list for not dying my hair.

"STUPEFY!" the secretary yells, but he shouldn't have bothered, because at the same time I scream "AVADA KEDAVRA!" with all my might, only my wand chooses this time to backfire, and all I see is black.

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I wake to water being splashed onto my face. It's not even cold, but room temperature, and some gets in my mouth and to be honest I've tasted better rotten meat. I blink and raise one hand to wipe the excuse for H20 out of my eyes, and someone chuckles.

"So you've decided to grace me with your presence, have you?" My fuzzy brain makes note of the fact that the man said 'me' as opposed to 'we,' which means there's only one other person in the room. I pride myself on my perceptiveness.

I try to say "What?" and "Who are you?" and "Where am I?" all at the same time, but it comes out more like "Whuuunhs ammu?"

"Come again?" I've opened my eyes properly, and I see a man standing on the other side of the room. His hair is grey and down to his shoulders, with a beard only slightly shorter, and he's wearing clothes that were probably once a dark green. The room is tiny and it's got really shabby walls and a dirty ceiling, which is mostly what I can see because I'm lying on my back on the concrete floor.

I decide to go with a simple, monosyllabic question: "Where?"

"You mean you don't know?" I shake my head, and the man laughs again. "You're in prison, Weasley." How does he know my name? Wait—did he say prison?

"Like jail prison?"

"No, like the prison where you get Cauldron Cakes and Pumpkin Pasties every day," he answers, and his sarcasm is kind of annoying, even though I'm not one to talk.

"But why am I here?" No, wait, stupid question—I tried and failed at killing the Minister's secretary. Then again, it's still valid, because why am I still alive if I failed? Or maybe this is heaven, which despite the shitty settings makes more sense than hell, because hell has got to be worse than being locked up. . . . In order to not confuse myself, I change the question to "How did I get here?" which makes a bit more sense.

"As far as I've inferred," he says, "you committed a horrible crime and because you're a Death Eater they've thrown you in a cell with me in the hopes that you'll off me so they don't have to release me again." At my puzzled look, he elaborates. "I was imprisoned for 'obstruction of justice,' which means the Ministry wanted me out of the way. I should have just been fined, but like I said, they wanted me out of the way. They've been keeping me in here ever since, claiming it's safer for me here than out in the real world. They still don't want to let me go, so if I had a Knut I'd bet you that they're hoping you'll get rid of me before you get the death sentence."

I'm still clueless—why does the Ministry want him out of the way? I say as much.

"You really don't know?" he asks again, and I begin to get kind of pissed at his patronizing attitude. Well, I would be getting kind of pissed if it didn't hurt my head so much. He doesn't wait for me to answer. "I'm Harry Potter, kid."

"I'm not a kid," I growl automatically, before his words really sink in. "But—Harry Potter?"

"The one and only," he replies tiredly, and he flips up his fringe to show me the lightning bolt scar in case I don't believe him. Not that I'd doubt it. Harry Potter pretty much disappeared from the face of the earth in the years before the Depression, and the whole thing had Ministry of Magic written all over it. Finding him in one of their cells isn't a huge surprise.

"But anyway, since I've told you so much about myself, why don't you at least tell me your first name?"

"Weasley's fine enough," I say, and I don't question how he knows I'm a Weasley because, hello, the hair, and he used to be my uncle's best friend before my uncle died and Harry was imprisoned.

Harry doesn't push it. Instead, he asks me why I tried to kill Lee Jordan.

"Who?" I ask, and then I realize that must be the Minister's secretary. "Oh—well, I do what Voldemort tells me." I'm not really afraid he's going to rat me out or anything, and I was probably strip-searched anyway, so the Ministry knows I'm a Death Eater.

But then I realize that the guy I'm stuck in a cell with until one of us dies is Harry Potter, and probably isn't going to take kindly to me working for the guy who made his life hell and killed his parents and all, even if that was thirty-odd years ago.

To my surprise, however, all he says is "Yeah, I know what you're thinking. It's fine. I don't care anymore—I hate the Ministry just as much as I hate Voldemort, and I'm not in a position to do anything about either one, so it doesn't make a difference."

Even as he says that, I know it does make a difference. I'm not a real emotional guy, but I've got some intuition. For example, when someone's blinking really hard and looking at the wall like he wants to beat the living shit out of it, that probably means he's frustrated. I recognize his tone of voice as one of a person who's resigned himself to his fate. Actually, he sounds kind of like me sometimes after I've taken tabs and the effects have worn off. Like he really doesn't care, but not in the 'Fuck you, I'll do what I want' way, the 'I'm not going to do anything with my life' way.

As soon as I found out I was in a cell with Harry Potter, my mind started working overtime. I mean, I'd love nothing more than to be held in high esteem by Voldemort—even if posthumously, because then nothing I do afterward can screw up my status—and here I am, stuck with the one person he's been trying to locate since 2003, when Harry disappeared.

Voldemort is convinced he still has to kill Harry Potter before he can take over, and says he knows Harry is still alive through some so-called connection between them. Up until about four minutes ago, I've thought that was all bull, but I don't really care about the details, just that the Death Eaters have a chance of overthrowing the government. But anyroad, Voldemort's got us assassinating all these prominent political figures (yes, I used an intelligent phrase. This is your cue to enter cardiac arrest) to make the Ministry hand over Harry Potter, and how that's supposed to work I have no idea; I just do what I'm told.

But the gist of it is, I would be a fucking god among Death Eaters if I turned over Harry Potter. So I say, "You know what? A Death Eater's gonna come neutralize—"

"Eh?" he interrupts.

"Neutralize; kill," I explain. "Someone's gonna come kill me tonight to make sure I don't give the Death Eaters away, and I bet it's going to be Voldemort. He likes to do things himself nowadays. It gives things a more personal touch, and it makes him feel like he doesn't depend on anyone. He won't be expecting you to be here; if you can figure out how you'll have the opportunity to kill him." The only lie in there is that Voldemort won't expect him to be here, and it's not even a lie yet. That ought to fool Harry's Occlumency.

"And I should believe you because?"

"You shouldn't," I say. "I'm just saying. If you want to achieve your life's goal or whatever, it's pretty much your only chance." And with that not-lie, I roll over and go back to sleep.

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When I wake up, Voldemort has his wand pressed to my jugular vein. "Any last words?" he hisses. Of course, he'll have the last word—he always does—but he's also a prima donna, and if you can find me one person who doesn't agree that 'Any last words?' has dramatic effect you can have twenty Sickles (emergency money) and my left nut (seeing as I'll be dead and all, so I won't care). But what I say next has even more dramatic effect:

"Yeah. That's Harry Potter behind you."

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A/N: This is a one-shot. There will be no sequels. 2,577,673,189 reviews pleading for me to continue this won't change my mind. However, I'd love to hear your honest-to-goodness opinion, whether you liked it or not :)