Title: Darkness Descending
Author: Sword of the Shadow
Summary: Lily and James agree to turn to the side of Voldemort on Halloween. Harry is raised to believe in the power of Voldemort for four years, until something unexpected changes that all. Can he do what he was destined to do if he grew up calling Voldemort "uncle"?
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or anything else in this story that you would recognize, but if you would like to sue me, go right ahead. You can sure go on a big shopping spree with about thirty cents.
~**~**~
Chapter One
~**~**~
Harry was not like other children his age. He had never really been like them. Oh, to be sure, he was smaller than a full grown adult, just as they were, and he was still attempting to figure out the world around him through trial and error, but there were more differences to be drawn than there were similarities.
Harry had never been innocent, not ever. His mother had told him the story, many, many times. He would sit, staring at her, with his emerald eyes flashing wide in the light of a single candle in whatever house they were holing up in for that week, and just listen to her words, drinking them in. Often, when she approached the scary parts or the ones where she was horrified at her own casual choice of words and even more monstrous actions, she would pull him onto her lap even more firmly than before and wrap two of her strong, comforting arms around him. Harry, despite the fact that his family's past would have been enough to petrify any other toddler, was never scared when his mother was near.
"You see, Harry," she would explain in her soothing voice, "we were fighting on the wrong side during the war. We were blinded by Dumbledore, the Muggle-loving fool, and so we failed to realize that it was the Dark Lord who had the right of it all along. So on Halloween, just a year after you were born, he came to our house. He talked to us, and made us able to see that he was the rightful master of all the wizarding kind, as well as the Muggles."
Her voice broke, cracking as if she loathed to spin the lies that she wove so constantly for her single son. Harry, as young as he was, failed to realize that his mother was only telling him this because, if she ever dared to tell him the truth, she would not be around to whisper any more bedtime stories in his ears the following night.
"And so we joined up with the Dark Lord, your dad and I, and we realized how much better it was to be a Death Eater than it was to be one of the members of the Order. We told them everything we knew, and we can now serve the Dark Lord as we were meant to."
Tears were streaking down her lovely face by this point, a face worn by acts of torture that she would rather not have committed had not resisting meant that the lives of her entire family, including herself, would be stripped away from her. Harry, with a child's simple faith, tried to comfort her by grabbing onto her and hugging her tightly, assuring her that she was on the right path. This only made her sob harder.
Looking at her son, she could not help but wonder if the sacrifice had been worth it. To be certain, James, Lily, and Harry were all together as they were meant to be, but at what cost? They had betrayed everyone, turned traitors, and were now helping the cause that they had once vowed to fight against until the last drop of their life blood fell out of the veins. Worst of all, a blow that turned from mental to emotional to physical every time her shocked mind brought the subject to the surface of her thoughts to torture her with, was Harry.
Harry was well fed, taken care of with the best things, and was never lacked anything. It was not his physical upbringing that worried her; it was the mental conditioning that he was recieving, the brainwashing that she herself was forced to become a part of. Ever since the young couple had been inducted into the shadowy ranks of the Death Eaters, Harry had been told of the majesty and might of the Dark Lord, of the filthiness and unworthiness of Muggles, squibs, and Muggle-borns.
He had watched, with his child's uncriticizing eyes, as hundreds were murdered by the Unforgivables and as others were slowly tortured in an effort to withdraw information that the victims may or may not have been the holders of. Worst of all were the times when the toddler had seen Muggles tortured for the sheer sport of the matter, and had even cheered when some masked Death Eater had explained to the boy what was happening.
It made Lily Evans Potter just plain sick.
Harry could not remain unchanged by his upbringing; she doubted that even the most pure of soul could. He laughed when Voldemort raised his wand and uttered the words Avada Kedavra, smiled whenever he was present as an Auror was brought forth to be interrogated and, eventually, broken.
If Lily had not known better, she would have thought that the boy belonged to Voldemort, curse him, than her.
If she had believed the Dark wizard capable of the feeling, she would have told anyone who would listen quite readily that Voldemort loved her son. Many times he would pull Harry up to sit next to him where he watched over the meetings of his Death Eaters with his cold, snake-like gaze. He would whisper things in Harry's ear, which would promptly cause Lily to pale, aware of the fact that he was corrupting her son as surely as he was evil and bent on the destruction of the vast majority of the world.
To her disgust, Harry would refer to the malicious Voldemort as uncle, a term which the cruel, heartless man endured as long as he was able to catch Lily's eyes and. though he spoke no words on the matter, made her clearly understand that her child, the fruit of her womb, was completely and irrevocably his. Then he would turn again to the child on his lap with a smile that was more of a sneer, adding more and more layers of brainwashing to the ones that were already wrapped thickly about his tender mind.
The Death Eaters were just as bad, if not worse, their wrongs multiplied by the hundreds of them. It was one of them-she personally suspected Lucius Malfoy- who had first wrapped Harry's fingers around a slender wand and taught him how to cast his first spell. Not Lily. Lily had missed out on the small but heady joys of that and many other parts of Harry growing up. A Death Eater taught Harry to read, another instructed him on how to play wizard's chess. Lily had a violent outburst when she first stumbled upon her son, with his booted feet kicking up in the air and his dark black robes and mask, a minature version of the Death Eater uniform, spread out about him, contemplating his next move with a dark-haired witch, her masked eyes gazing at Harry almost lovingly.
James was almost as bad as Harry, though in a much different sort of way. He seemed to think that the only way he could protect his wife would be to separate himself from her whenever they were in the presence of the master that they would rather have not had anything to do with so that Voldemort would think that he cared for her little. That way, she would no longer be a pawn to be used against him, would cease to be a vulnerability that Voldemort could rip open wide. They grew more and more distant out of what James saw as a necesity and what Lily saw as another unnesecary layer of protection from the Dark Lord.
Right now, though, all of that was far away. The small family of three was comfortably settled in a small house in the middle of a Muggle village. Voldemort professed that it was for their defense, but Lily knew that it was just a test to see how well he could test the family that had been with him for four years already.
Harry, with his uncontrollable black hair and round glasses, was standing next to his father, both of them with wands pulled out and held at the ready. They were a matched set, the two of them, save for their size and the color of their eyes. Where Harry's were the same brillaint emerald green of Lily's, James' were a warm hazel.
When he was here, alone with them, Lily could almost forget that Harry was being reared to the idea that the Dark Lord had the divine right (or some thing like it at the very least, she doubted that Voldemort had ever had any kind of religion) to rule the world and completely eradicate any and all Muggles. Here, Harry was brought down from where he played tag with a group of Death Eaters and he no longer seemed the kind of little boy who would laugh at the administration of an Unforgivable upon the most innocent of specimens. Sometimes Lily wondered if Harry were not the one fooling them all, convincing his parents that he was truly happy as a young Death Eater and also tricking Voldemort into thinking that Harry was bound to germinate into his right-hand man when he reached an appropriate age.
Harry already knew much more magic than he should have at five, but that was another plan of his parents. If they could make Harry invaluable to the Dark Lord, then he would be allowed to live. That was all that really mattered to the two stunned parents: Harry's survival.
At the moment, James was showing Harry an advanced type of shadow charm that would allow him to be invisible so long as he skulked in dark places. Harry had picked up on it immediately, and was flitting about the room, completely unseen by either of his parents. Laughing, he collapsed in a heap on the richly carpeted floor, rolling around in his merriment.
"Careful, Harry!" she warned as he approached too closely to the fireplace for her comfort.
Harry glanced up at her and quickly stopped his boisterous activities, pushing himself into a standing position with the help of his small arms. His eyes fixed on something behind her, staring intently at that single spot. Just as Lily turned around to see what it was that had so engrossed her son, there was an audible pop and two men were standing in the middle of the warm room.
"Sirius! Remus!" James breathed, hazel eyes wide at the sight of his two best friends. "You can't be here; you have to go now!"
"Worried about us, Prongs?" Sirius asked with an easy smirk, leaning casually against the couch while nodding briefly to a shocked Lily. "We're not the one who's been a Death Eater for the past four years."
"An unwilling one only," Lily hastened to reassure the pair.
"Of course. The mere idea that you two would have turned to the dark side is preposterous!" Remus admitted. His brown hair, liberally peppered with gray, was brushed impatiently out of his eyes as he took a step forward. "Which is why we're here."
"To do what?" James asked, just as Harry broke in.
"Who're they, mum?" he asked, childish voice filled with confusion and more than a little fright. Lily motioned for Harry to join her on the couch, which he did promptly, vaulting onto the plump cushions and burrowing down with a thump. He peered at Sirius and Remus with his eyes that had seen too much, then cocked his head in a puzzled manner. "Do I know them?"
"There's no time for that now. Sirius, what do you think you're doing? Voldemort will not refrain from killing you when he finds out that you're here."
"That's why he won't find out. We apparated here, and we can apparate back out. Voldemort won't have to know until we are far away from here." Sirius still wore his grin, and now it widened as he outlined precisely how they were about to beat the evil wizard.
"He has spies here, Sirius! He'll already know that you came to us; the best thing that you can do now is to go!" Harry had never heard his mother use that forceful a tone with anyone, and it frightened him. He dug deeper down into the cushions of the couch, eyes widening until they were bright emerald orbs that took over much of his face.
"Very astute of you, Lily," a cold new voice sneered condescendingly. "But they won't be able to flee now."
~**~**~
All right, so that's just the beginning. Feel free to review, flame, or whatever, so long as it involves pressing the little button down there and typing in comments.
Author: Sword of the Shadow
Summary: Lily and James agree to turn to the side of Voldemort on Halloween. Harry is raised to believe in the power of Voldemort for four years, until something unexpected changes that all. Can he do what he was destined to do if he grew up calling Voldemort "uncle"?
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or anything else in this story that you would recognize, but if you would like to sue me, go right ahead. You can sure go on a big shopping spree with about thirty cents.
~**~**~
Chapter One
~**~**~
Harry was not like other children his age. He had never really been like them. Oh, to be sure, he was smaller than a full grown adult, just as they were, and he was still attempting to figure out the world around him through trial and error, but there were more differences to be drawn than there were similarities.
Harry had never been innocent, not ever. His mother had told him the story, many, many times. He would sit, staring at her, with his emerald eyes flashing wide in the light of a single candle in whatever house they were holing up in for that week, and just listen to her words, drinking them in. Often, when she approached the scary parts or the ones where she was horrified at her own casual choice of words and even more monstrous actions, she would pull him onto her lap even more firmly than before and wrap two of her strong, comforting arms around him. Harry, despite the fact that his family's past would have been enough to petrify any other toddler, was never scared when his mother was near.
"You see, Harry," she would explain in her soothing voice, "we were fighting on the wrong side during the war. We were blinded by Dumbledore, the Muggle-loving fool, and so we failed to realize that it was the Dark Lord who had the right of it all along. So on Halloween, just a year after you were born, he came to our house. He talked to us, and made us able to see that he was the rightful master of all the wizarding kind, as well as the Muggles."
Her voice broke, cracking as if she loathed to spin the lies that she wove so constantly for her single son. Harry, as young as he was, failed to realize that his mother was only telling him this because, if she ever dared to tell him the truth, she would not be around to whisper any more bedtime stories in his ears the following night.
"And so we joined up with the Dark Lord, your dad and I, and we realized how much better it was to be a Death Eater than it was to be one of the members of the Order. We told them everything we knew, and we can now serve the Dark Lord as we were meant to."
Tears were streaking down her lovely face by this point, a face worn by acts of torture that she would rather not have committed had not resisting meant that the lives of her entire family, including herself, would be stripped away from her. Harry, with a child's simple faith, tried to comfort her by grabbing onto her and hugging her tightly, assuring her that she was on the right path. This only made her sob harder.
Looking at her son, she could not help but wonder if the sacrifice had been worth it. To be certain, James, Lily, and Harry were all together as they were meant to be, but at what cost? They had betrayed everyone, turned traitors, and were now helping the cause that they had once vowed to fight against until the last drop of their life blood fell out of the veins. Worst of all, a blow that turned from mental to emotional to physical every time her shocked mind brought the subject to the surface of her thoughts to torture her with, was Harry.
Harry was well fed, taken care of with the best things, and was never lacked anything. It was not his physical upbringing that worried her; it was the mental conditioning that he was recieving, the brainwashing that she herself was forced to become a part of. Ever since the young couple had been inducted into the shadowy ranks of the Death Eaters, Harry had been told of the majesty and might of the Dark Lord, of the filthiness and unworthiness of Muggles, squibs, and Muggle-borns.
He had watched, with his child's uncriticizing eyes, as hundreds were murdered by the Unforgivables and as others were slowly tortured in an effort to withdraw information that the victims may or may not have been the holders of. Worst of all were the times when the toddler had seen Muggles tortured for the sheer sport of the matter, and had even cheered when some masked Death Eater had explained to the boy what was happening.
It made Lily Evans Potter just plain sick.
Harry could not remain unchanged by his upbringing; she doubted that even the most pure of soul could. He laughed when Voldemort raised his wand and uttered the words Avada Kedavra, smiled whenever he was present as an Auror was brought forth to be interrogated and, eventually, broken.
If Lily had not known better, she would have thought that the boy belonged to Voldemort, curse him, than her.
If she had believed the Dark wizard capable of the feeling, she would have told anyone who would listen quite readily that Voldemort loved her son. Many times he would pull Harry up to sit next to him where he watched over the meetings of his Death Eaters with his cold, snake-like gaze. He would whisper things in Harry's ear, which would promptly cause Lily to pale, aware of the fact that he was corrupting her son as surely as he was evil and bent on the destruction of the vast majority of the world.
To her disgust, Harry would refer to the malicious Voldemort as uncle, a term which the cruel, heartless man endured as long as he was able to catch Lily's eyes and. though he spoke no words on the matter, made her clearly understand that her child, the fruit of her womb, was completely and irrevocably his. Then he would turn again to the child on his lap with a smile that was more of a sneer, adding more and more layers of brainwashing to the ones that were already wrapped thickly about his tender mind.
The Death Eaters were just as bad, if not worse, their wrongs multiplied by the hundreds of them. It was one of them-she personally suspected Lucius Malfoy- who had first wrapped Harry's fingers around a slender wand and taught him how to cast his first spell. Not Lily. Lily had missed out on the small but heady joys of that and many other parts of Harry growing up. A Death Eater taught Harry to read, another instructed him on how to play wizard's chess. Lily had a violent outburst when she first stumbled upon her son, with his booted feet kicking up in the air and his dark black robes and mask, a minature version of the Death Eater uniform, spread out about him, contemplating his next move with a dark-haired witch, her masked eyes gazing at Harry almost lovingly.
James was almost as bad as Harry, though in a much different sort of way. He seemed to think that the only way he could protect his wife would be to separate himself from her whenever they were in the presence of the master that they would rather have not had anything to do with so that Voldemort would think that he cared for her little. That way, she would no longer be a pawn to be used against him, would cease to be a vulnerability that Voldemort could rip open wide. They grew more and more distant out of what James saw as a necesity and what Lily saw as another unnesecary layer of protection from the Dark Lord.
Right now, though, all of that was far away. The small family of three was comfortably settled in a small house in the middle of a Muggle village. Voldemort professed that it was for their defense, but Lily knew that it was just a test to see how well he could test the family that had been with him for four years already.
Harry, with his uncontrollable black hair and round glasses, was standing next to his father, both of them with wands pulled out and held at the ready. They were a matched set, the two of them, save for their size and the color of their eyes. Where Harry's were the same brillaint emerald green of Lily's, James' were a warm hazel.
When he was here, alone with them, Lily could almost forget that Harry was being reared to the idea that the Dark Lord had the divine right (or some thing like it at the very least, she doubted that Voldemort had ever had any kind of religion) to rule the world and completely eradicate any and all Muggles. Here, Harry was brought down from where he played tag with a group of Death Eaters and he no longer seemed the kind of little boy who would laugh at the administration of an Unforgivable upon the most innocent of specimens. Sometimes Lily wondered if Harry were not the one fooling them all, convincing his parents that he was truly happy as a young Death Eater and also tricking Voldemort into thinking that Harry was bound to germinate into his right-hand man when he reached an appropriate age.
Harry already knew much more magic than he should have at five, but that was another plan of his parents. If they could make Harry invaluable to the Dark Lord, then he would be allowed to live. That was all that really mattered to the two stunned parents: Harry's survival.
At the moment, James was showing Harry an advanced type of shadow charm that would allow him to be invisible so long as he skulked in dark places. Harry had picked up on it immediately, and was flitting about the room, completely unseen by either of his parents. Laughing, he collapsed in a heap on the richly carpeted floor, rolling around in his merriment.
"Careful, Harry!" she warned as he approached too closely to the fireplace for her comfort.
Harry glanced up at her and quickly stopped his boisterous activities, pushing himself into a standing position with the help of his small arms. His eyes fixed on something behind her, staring intently at that single spot. Just as Lily turned around to see what it was that had so engrossed her son, there was an audible pop and two men were standing in the middle of the warm room.
"Sirius! Remus!" James breathed, hazel eyes wide at the sight of his two best friends. "You can't be here; you have to go now!"
"Worried about us, Prongs?" Sirius asked with an easy smirk, leaning casually against the couch while nodding briefly to a shocked Lily. "We're not the one who's been a Death Eater for the past four years."
"An unwilling one only," Lily hastened to reassure the pair.
"Of course. The mere idea that you two would have turned to the dark side is preposterous!" Remus admitted. His brown hair, liberally peppered with gray, was brushed impatiently out of his eyes as he took a step forward. "Which is why we're here."
"To do what?" James asked, just as Harry broke in.
"Who're they, mum?" he asked, childish voice filled with confusion and more than a little fright. Lily motioned for Harry to join her on the couch, which he did promptly, vaulting onto the plump cushions and burrowing down with a thump. He peered at Sirius and Remus with his eyes that had seen too much, then cocked his head in a puzzled manner. "Do I know them?"
"There's no time for that now. Sirius, what do you think you're doing? Voldemort will not refrain from killing you when he finds out that you're here."
"That's why he won't find out. We apparated here, and we can apparate back out. Voldemort won't have to know until we are far away from here." Sirius still wore his grin, and now it widened as he outlined precisely how they were about to beat the evil wizard.
"He has spies here, Sirius! He'll already know that you came to us; the best thing that you can do now is to go!" Harry had never heard his mother use that forceful a tone with anyone, and it frightened him. He dug deeper down into the cushions of the couch, eyes widening until they were bright emerald orbs that took over much of his face.
"Very astute of you, Lily," a cold new voice sneered condescendingly. "But they won't be able to flee now."
~**~**~
All right, so that's just the beginning. Feel free to review, flame, or whatever, so long as it involves pressing the little button down there and typing in comments.