Chapter One
AN: Well, this is eventually going to be a TomXHarry fic. This is because I ship it and I will not change my mind if your not into that, you can stop reading the fic right here. Oh and before I forget, (and I will forget), here are your disclaimers.
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. It is the sole property of Warner Brothers, J.K. Rowling, ect. and they possess all of the characters you recognize from the novels. Any OC's I decide to include, for whatever unfathomable reason, are mine.
Rating: Mature for possible scenes of masturabation, pedophilia, murder, torture scenes, cursing, sex with minors, semi-consensual sex, non-consensual sex. Sorry if any of this offends your sensibilities, but if so please click off this fanfiction now. Wow, that was quite a list.
Recommendations: If you really like this fanfiction, I would recommend Xerosis by Batsutousai and Again and Again by Athey. They are two of my favorite fanfiction and served as an inspiration for this one.
Chapter Word Total: 5256
"Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are." - Niccolo Machiavelli
Green eyes opened peering heavily at the shambled room around him. Though he had motor control and he seemed able to pivot his arms and legs around to stand, he was still trapped in the crib with his mother's corpse lying silently staring at nothing beside him. Ashes and broken wood and fragments of what had been his baby room laid scattered, the empty robes on the floor making light of the situation.
His head ached, and he felt fevered and ill but oddly excited and yet detached from where he was, as if he wasn't actually experiencing this series of events again. He did not want to think of the war or death or Voldemort or Dumbledore. He had not wanted to think about anything, but he was back here. Why was he a child again staring at his mother's corpse waiting for someone to take him from this place? Why was he peering into this wrecked cottage again?
A loud slamming sound echoed from downstairs and Harry fell to his butt quietly in surprise, his chubby hands losing their grip on the crib bars, landing on a particularly soft blanket covered in snitches and broomsticks. It was hard still to move his limbs, but he seemed capable of some fine movements and his legs at least appeared sturdy enough when he braced against the crib bars. At least he wasn't completely helpless. He ran his hand over the soft comfort holding it like a shield against the quiet devastation that surrounded him.
'It must be...Severus first, I believe. Then it must have been Sirius, then Hagrid.' Harry remembered, as the loud banging continued reminiscent of someone thundering up the staircase to his nursery. 'So this must be Severus.'
And then a young, strikingly young, Severus Snape appeared breathing hard after searching every room but the one Harry had slept in. And then Harry felt disgusted with himself for watching the man break down as the man fell to his knees and sobbed for Lily Potter. Severus did nothing by halves though, as he must have sat there mourning over Harry's mother for twenty minutes before managing to gain any kind of semblance of control.
Harry quickly weighed the possibilities of this situation, wondering if Severus would be a better caregiver than the Dursley's and nearly reflexively snorted in disbelief. Almost anything with a pulse would have been better than the Dursley's at caregiving, and though the man was caustic and weathered he most certainly had a pulse.
Making up his mind, Harry considered how he could get the man to remove him from the rubble before deciding simply making the man aware of his presence would be a significant step in the right direction.
"Mommy?" Harry whispered startling the grieving man out of his mourning.
"Potter," Severus snarled angry at being disturbed and then turned to actually notice the boy in the crib, the boy's face absolutely drenched in blood and a deep gouge in his forehead in the shape of a lightning bolt. The man visibly paled.
"The dark lord…." Snape trailed off almost as if he was looking for answers to the unasked question from the toddler in front of him.
"Bye-bye," Harry said, grimacing internally at the difficulty of the words, pointing to the discarded clothing on the floor boards, "Whoosh, whoosh. Bye-bye."
A look of almost absolute confusion appeared on the man's face after he stared at the empty ashes of the Dark Lord. Severus then stood firmly before walking towards the young boy. He plucked the boy from the crib holding him at eye level before the sullen man's face seemed to collapse in on itself. For a moment, a single solitary moment Harry allowed himself to believe that Snape was going to carry him out of the broken shambles of his home, that this time Snape was going to be different. Then the man's eye's hardened, darkening noticeably, and the man sighed deeply, audibly.
And then the man sat him back down gently in the crib, and turned, resolutely walking away from Harry and Lily. Harry alone watched all of this, his green eyes hard as stone, anger pooling in his stomach. It seemed that no matter what Harry did or didn't do, the blame for someone else's actions would come to rest on his shoulders.
It would be another two hours before Sirius came for him.
Ms. Dursley was possibly the most shocked woman in all of Surrey, finding a toddler on her doorstep that early November morning. It, because it couldn't be anything else but an it, had been left there like an unwanted, unneeded gift with that blasted letter. It wasn't as if the letter had told her much, outside of the fact that those nasty freakish people her sister always spent all her time with had finally gotten her and her worthless husband blown up. The only part that concerned her was the fact that this letter, if it could even be called that written as it was on parchment paper as was, demanded that she take the brat of a boy in. It claimed that she and her husband were the last living blood relatives of the boy, which she believed. The freaks had a nasty habit of getting people killed.
'Well,' Petunia thought indignantly, 'I will not stand for this! But first, I must make sure that the neighbors haven't seen him.'
And so she peered her beady eyes out the door of number four Privet Drive, and craned her enormously long neck out the door to scan for any early-rising no-good gossiping women who might have spotted the child, although it was unlikely. After all, she alway took the garbage out early in the morning before all the other residents had risen. It wasn't like she wanted to be seen doing something so common in front of the other women.
After assuring herself that the boy hadn't been seen by any of the neighbors, she stooped low and grabbed him, holding it extended from her body before quickly ducking back inside the house, the garbage bag dropped as she stared down at the creature in her arms. He looked so normal, still sleeping in her arms, just as Dudley would. But if Lily had shown Petunia one thing, it was that these people were not normal. They could look normal and sound normal and do normal things, but if you dug deeply enough you would find the rotten festering freakishness inside them.
Steeling herself, Petunia placed it on the couch, and went to skim the letter once more before she screwed up the letter and nearly burst into tears. It seemed as if Lily always got everything she wanted. She had always gotten the best dresses, the finest presents, the handsome suitors. Lilly had gotten the magic and the brains, the beauty and the talent, and by God Petunia couldn't see how it was fair that her sister got to take any pieces of Petunia's perfectly normal life and smash it smithereens. But the letter said not to send the boy away, that it was important for her family's safety that they take the nasty freak into their normal home. Petunia still remembered the disaster when her own parents had refused such an offer of protection.
There were just too many things for her to consider by herself with the still sleeping baby-, no thing, - never a child, never a child right beside her.
She quickly straightened herself up, and glanced at the clock on the mantle place beside the numerous photos of Dudley. It was only a quarter past six, and she generally would never wake Vernon up this early, but she knew that she couldn't make this decision alone. She needed her husband's input.
"Absolutely not! Petunia, we agreed that there would never be any of this funny business. Your sister and her idiotic, unemployed husband may have managed to get themselves blown up, but I will not be cleaning up after them! You know what happens when those people mix with us normal folk!" Vernon bolstered loudly, his face a darkened blotchy purple and red. "People end up dead! That's what happens to us Petunia! I will not have Dudley exposed to such things! Think of your parents, Petunia!Think of what the freaks did to them."
Petunia had only just finished explaining what had happened that morning to her over excited husband and she sighed again. It felt like this was the thirtieth time this morning she had sighed like that and Vernon's yelling wasn't doing much for her headache, so she simply passed him the letter that had been left on the step with the Potter child.
"What's this rubbish?" Vernon asked gruffly, as he had finally stopped bellowing when he noticed his wife rubbing circles into her temples.
"It's the letter they sent with the boy when they dumped him on our read it, Vernon. I'm going to go ahead and make breakfast. I hadn't started yet because of the interruptions this morning." She said nodding to Harry who laid, still asleep in a cardboard box on the cabinet.
The next few minutes were filled only with silence, the quiet popping of grease, and Vernon's mumbling as he read and reread the offending document before him. By the end of it Vernon had mangled the letter so badly that it was barely legible anymore, and a blood vessel was protruding quite noticeably from his forehead as he worked himself up into being angrier and angrier than he originally was, until he was literally spitting out phrases like,"...Required to maintain and care for nephew… age of wizarding majority… seventeen. Hogwarts School For Witches and Wizards!" and, "Warding around my home… danger from terrorist groups…"
It was only the clattering of Petunia setting the table and minutes later the sudden shrieking of his own son waking up that shook him from his angry musing to notice that the Potter brat, who he had honestly assumed to be asleep for the entire duration of his and Petunia's conversation was now staring at him as he sat in the cardboard box, the boy's eyes an eerie, hard set shade of green. Feeling a sudden shiver go down his neck, Vernon got up and made his way onto his dining chair.
"We don't have that much of a choice, Vernon," Petunia advised quietly as she spoon fed Dudley the mashed banana and monitored the way he attempted to hold his cup up. "They always get what they want, and if they want to have him stay in this house, we can accommodate that. I can clear out that cupboard underneath the stair and he will be plenty far enough away from our Dinky Duddydums so he won't contaminate him with his freakishness. All we would have to do is put locks on the door so he can't get out unless we let him. And just imagine, in a couple of years we can put him to work cleaning and cooking, after all, he would have to earn his keep."
"What about this warding? What does it do? Wouldn't they be able to tell if we do anything to the boy?" Vernon wondered aloud.
Petunia snorted lightly, "If anything that's the only reason why I'm willing to accept him. It's supposedly a type of protection that they can place on the house to keep us safe. My mother and Father declined this same type of protection right before they died, although there's most certainly did not come with a freak attached."
Her face pinched tightly and she ran a bony hand through her blonde hair, " Although I loathe to admit it Vernon, the freak shouldn't be as much trouble to keep as it would be to get rid of him. Those people know things, and since they've dumped him on us we will just have to make the best of it."
Vernon Dursley would be the first person to renounce his nephew, even before Petunia. After all Dursley's were well mannered, well bred, stocky men and women who most certainly did not involve themselves with fantasy and definitely not anything abnormal. And Vernon Dursley's nephew Harry Potter most certainly was abnormal.
From the very moment Harry Potter had set foot in Privet Drive Number four, there had been something slightly… peculiar about the boy. For one, though Petunia probably should have noticed it first, Vernon noticed by the time the boy was five years old he had never smiled. Even as a baby, the Potter child had simply stared at nothing, his eyes burning the air like molten lava. Another, perhaps the more peculiar thing was that the boy never spoke. The Dursley's were perhaps more content with the fact that the boy never spoke than they were concerned. As far as they cared, it was perfectly normal behavior for a freak.
But five years old was when Vernon started noticing the boy. Started noticing the darkness to his eyes, the smirk that graced his upturned mouth, the lips that never smiled. He noticed the litheness of the boy, how tiny he was compared to his own girth, bloody hell compared to his own son's girth. He noticed the small hands and the demure stature.
The first time he thought about the boy as he stroked his own length, he convinced himself it was an accident. The second time he was positive it was just a mistake, but by the fourth or fifth time he began to slowly try to rationalize his thoughts.
He knew that wanking to the most vulgar thoughts of the boy was probably wrong, even if the boy was a freak, but Vernon had never been one for self-restraint, and so his mind wandered to all the filthy things he could make the boy do. Things that normal people like Petunia would never do. Things he would never think of asking Petunia to do.
After all, it wasn't like the boy was normal. It wasn't like he was human. He was just a freak. Vernon could do whatever he wanted after all, he took care of the brat didn't he? Fed him. Clothed him. Gave him room and board. Petunia's words from four years ago haunted his sleep every night. After all, the boy owed him, owed them for everything.
Didn't he?
His graying hair was hanging down in his face and he had the most terrible stitch in his side. is entire body pulsed with pain and anguish but still he ran on. The only alternative was death. Painful, encompassing, complete death. The muggles catcalled after him, braying loudly. Suddenly, an explosive noise erupted and Harry fell to his face, gasping in pain his hands instinctively fumbling for the bullet wound. He began chanting quickly, his magic surging to close the hole faster, but he already knew it was too late.
Just as the skin and sinew knitted together enough for him to raise himself up from the cold hard ground, the team of Hunters emerged into the clearing. Muggles. Hunters. Whatever one called them they both meant the same thing for magicals. Death.
Harry Potter was screaming and begging for several hours before he died.
Harry bolted awake in his cot under the stairs. He nearly slammed his head into the ceiling and he felt the tears running down his face in rivulets. Harry kept forgetting than he was only five, every night felt like he was back surviving by the skin of his teeth, running blindly from death. It felt like a dream being here with his filthy muggle relatives, playing family. He still felt like he would wake up there, starving and dying and alone.
He rested his head firmly against the wall nearest to his cot, shivering as the sweat against his body reckoned that nightmare's had always been with him haunting him, even when reality had decided that he had had enough. They had been there entirely though his first life, through his early years with the Dursley's, into Hogwarts, and passed that into his professional and romantic life. They were a constant when he had been on the run with Ron and Hermione and present throughout his rocky marriage to Ginny.
Sometimes, Harry was simply certain that he had gone insane. How else would he have ended up back where he obviously didn't belong. Perhaps it was that Harry was simply being too much of a Potter at breaking the rules. He snorted. Now he was being ridiculous.
He rolled over and closed his eyes, resolute in once again finding sleep.
"Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception."
― Niccolò Machiavelli,
Harry Potter knew good and well what Vernon Dursley was up to in the dead of night in the days following his fifth birthday. He was the one doing the sheets and the laundry making the breakfast and doing most of the menial chores around the house after all. He wanted to fit in for as long as possible, and the easiest way to do such a thing was remain with the Dursley's until he turned eleven. Still, the family put him on edge much more than it had in his first life. That was most certainly due to the fact that he either hadn't noticed his perverted Uncle during his first life, or something had changed the man enough to make him think that being attracted to a young child was an acceptable thing to do.
Whatever the man's reason, Harry was left dealing with the indirect results of Vernon's making. Petunia was absolutely enraged. Whether it was Harry's fault or not, she had seen the signs as well as he had, but as the man hadn't actually done anything…
Harry knew very well as he stared into the frying bacon that divorce between his aunt and uncle would never happen. Even if the man had taken Harry in his first life, Petunia wouldn't have left the man. They were just so obsessed with everything dull, with everything boring and ordinary.
It was then that Petunia finally strode into the kitchen, sniffing daintily at the smell of eggs and bacon and toast that filled the entire room. She tossed a vindictive,"You better not burn it, freak." his way before making her way out of the kitchen and back up stairs to wake her husband and son.
Harry rolled his eyes, his opinion of muggles had severely deteriorated in the last sixty years. In his opinion his aunt and uncle were definitely prime examples of muggle trash. Not that he hated all of the muggles. Not really, it was probably more of a controlled wariness, fear and of course select hatred for the scum of the earth. But Harry supposed that hating scum was a relatively normal occupation of anyone's time.
Dumping the mountains of eggs and bacon onto the large platters sitting at the dining table, Harry quickly sat the table for three as he heard his aunt, uncle and cousin trundling down the staircase. While eating after the Dursley's did pose obvious disadvantages to the amount of food he had available, it did grant him with one wonderful reprieve: avoiding having to see the two massive whales now sitting in the kitchen eating.
And it allowed Harry to slip away to do some hunting of his own.
The first time Harry had gone hunting, he had been in his late sixties. It was one of the last raids the British Ministry had been able to put together with the dwindling amounts of witches and wizards they were able to contact. Simply put, while the raids had initially been implemented in 2020, they had mutated by the early forties. While the original raids had taken into account the massive increases in muggle populations and had attempted to protect the individual, by the forties that mentality had been discarded for a much colder approach. The twenties targeted only those who ran their mouth and hospitals; the forties slaughtered muggles.
By the forties, almost no one had been left though. It was obvious that single groups of thirty witches and wizards stood no chances against the twelve billion humans on the earth. There were simply too many. The eradication of wizarding kind had been apparent since Harry was a child though, if he had only been looking for it. The older generations took too long to die out, and so new ideas simply took too long to come to fruition. There were too many internalized wizarding wars, too much death in the nineteen-forties, again in the nineteen-seventies, and again in the early two thousands. There was too much inbreeding and not enough attention paid to the statute of secrecy. Harry snorted. Too much would have, could have, should have for his taste. The stagnation of their world had damned them all probably before he was born.
The hunting also helped satiated that strange feeling he'd come to experience since his early teen years. He hadn't named it until his sixties, until that first raid. Rage.
Insanity destroys reason, but not wit. - Nathaniel Emmons
The first muggle Harry murdered in his new life was probably in his late thirties. Harry had met the man twice, once in his uncle's parlor as the man bargained over fine wine and pork roast, for drill prices and chatted amiably about golf. The second time was that very day, when the small boy apparated directly to the man's home.
The Dursley's wouldn't notice Harry's absence until eight, when his school called them wondering if the young boy was ill.
Harry glanced at his watch. 7:15. He grinned.
Harry let himself into the first brown brick two-story house on Cuthbert Street. He had done his research, like always, and knew that the home housed a single working man by the name of Theodore Thatcher. The man was muggle through and through, though perhaps more disgusting than most muggles in the nineteen-nineties. A peodophile, Harry had seen the obvious glances that the man had sent his way the night he had had dinner at the Dursley's, and the polite smiles he had shared with Vernon when they discussed the boys. Outside of that, a cursory glimpse into the man's mind had brought forward several of the man's fantasies that now nauseatingly featured Harry himself.
Harry shuddered as he opened the front door and slipped off his shoes. Setting them by the front door and conjuring a pair of surgical gloves, he took careful stock of his magical reserves. He was already feeling the small amount of magic he had cast taking a minor toll on his deaged body. He simply wasn't experienced using vast quantities of his core, although he could still feel every drop of his power from his previous life. That would have to change. Oh well. It simply meant more hunting.
Harry could hear the water running in the upstairs bathroom from the living room and he threw himself onto the leather upholstered sofa and hunkered down to wait for his victim.
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At about a quarter to eight, Mr. Thatcher ran down the staircase in almost a blind panic. He was late again. It must have been the third time this week. Mr. Thatcher did not do late. He was a prompt man, always had been and always would be but it seemed in the last week the world itself had decided to conspire against him. He'd broken an alarm clock, gotten stuck behind several slow commuters, and now fallen asleep in the shower. It was absurd but now once again he was in a rush to Pinkerstone hoping he could make his eight o'clock meeting.
Thatcher had no transition between running for his front door, his mind already occupied by the problems he would encounter at work today, and lying on his back in the living room with a small figure staring ominously down at him.
"Hi," said the small boy squatting beside him. "How do you feel?" The boy's hair was familiar, but confusion quickly won out over curiousity, which bled into fear as he realized he couldn't move.
"What's going on?" His voice wavered noticeably, "Who are you?"
"Shhh," The young boy moved his finger to his lips, "I'll be asking the question, Mr. Thatcher. It is suffice to say that we have met before. And might I say, Mr. Thatcher, you have made yourself quite a powerful enemy. Now, let me ask again once again. How do you feel?"
"Now look here! I am not someone to be trifled with boy-"
"Crucio"
Pain. He felt pain like nothing he had ever felt before, like every nerve was on fire inside his body, like his entire being was trying desperately to rip itself atom from atom. Suddenly the pain stopped, and the small figure fell slightly forward, panting in exertion.
"What was that? Thirty-seven seconds? Pathetic." The figure mumbled to himself, "But holy shit what a rush. These last few years have robbed me of so much this pleasure. Dealing with your filthy kind will be a welcome reprieve in the coming years."
"Well, how do you feel Mr. Thatcher? We don't have long before I must really be going, after all, a school boy must go to school. Though, it will be awfully sad when the grand businessman doesn't go to work anymore." The boy chuckled darkly, his darkened green eyes meeting his own for mere seconds before he was able to make the connection.
"The boy! Dursley's nephew!" He gaped in shock. What was this boy doing in his home?
"Ah, hole in one, Mr. Thatcher. I suppose it's apt for you to recognize my eyes, since I think we have just about run out of time." The brat glared petulantly at him. "I don't see why you had to go and ruin my fun like that though, taking a full twenty minutes longer than normal this morning in the shower than normal. Tsk tsk, Mr. Thatcher. I thought you were the epitome of all that is normal and punctual and prompt. Well, at least my fat whale of an uncle still has something to aspire to. Anyway, are you ever going to answer my question?"
Abruptly, Mr. Thatcher did suddenly noticed that something was off... That his intimate area did feel rather… peculiar. Like there was a certain numbness. His face dawned with horror suddenly as he realized that something rather important was missing from him.
Harry began laughing at the panic dawning on the man's face almost immediately, relishing the man's pain. "Well," he said wiping the tears from his eyes,"that is absolutely delightful! I suppose I simply must allow you to actually feel the damage I've done before we finish up here."
Removing his numbing charm from the man's freshly castrated pelvis, Harry finished cutting through the bloody ooze to the remaining nerves that still held the man's penis to his body with the most beautiful carving knife he had found in the man's pantry. He made sure to do this very slowly listening to the screaming as if was a symphony.
Smiling with maniacal delight as a idea possessed him, he grabbed Thatcher's throat, holding it tightly to force the man to keep his mouth wide so Harry could shove the bloody penis down the man's throat. Setting aside the remaining bits of the once functioning genitalia, Harry grabbed the knife and laughed loudly. "I hope you fucking choke on it you filthy son of a bitch."He glanced at his watch. He only had three minutes to finish whatever he was going to do before he'd need to cast a cleaning charm and apparate to school. Whatever would Harry do?
Glancing down at what remained of Mr. Thatcher gave Harry a grand idea, and he snickered wildly as he shoved the man's balls into his eye sockets. Though he had only taken a large mass of skin from the man, most of what remained was actually spread across the living room. He'd run blood and guts halfway up the walls with magic and had actually managed to get Thatcher's stomach attached to the hanging light fixture above their heads. Other organs either lined the house or filled what remained of the man's abdominal cavity. Though the man had died, it had probably only been when Harry had sliced the man's throat open. Whatever, not like it was Harry's problem anymore. Harry shook his head and cast two more charms, one cleaning all the blood from his body and another expunging it from his clothes.
He was still three minutes late to class that morning.
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Harry was very bored of being in primary school. Actually, Harry was very bored of being in Surrey, England. He was tired of stopping himself from saying nasty spiteful things to his equally spiteful aunt, and avoiding spending any time alone with Vernon Dursley, tired of circumnavigating teachers and Dudley, and Piers and all the stupid muggle trash that existed in a very narrow space.
Harry sighed. Rationally, he knew that all muggles weren't bad. They weren't all lazy or ignorant, but so many of them were that it made him morose. Things hadn't ended well in his last life, yes, and it didn't give him the right to psychotically murder people now. Still, it made him feel better and had the perks of getting rid of some of the vermin that had contributed to his death originally. That was always a good thing in his opinion.
Harry found that perhaps one of his favorite perks of redoing his life was his new appreciation for parseltongue. His acquisition of Clementine was perhaps the most entertaining thing to happen to him in a while. Though Clementine was only a garden snake, she was surprisingly witty and had helped Harry come to terms with his strange do-over. Most important though was the fact that she was only a foot long and weighed perhaps three ounces, which meant he was able to keep her coiled around his wrist when he wore long sleeved hand me downs.
Harry had found Clementine at age four, and it had actually only been her calm reassurances that had kept him from murdering the entirety of the Dursley family and simply going to Albania in order to look for Riddle. After all, Harry was positive that this phenomenon had something to do with that man, and god damn it he was going to have answers.
While Harry had actually succeeded in defeating Voldemort in his original timeline, Harry had had his suspicions as to the efficacy of killing the man. The muggles had still murdered them all. The world had still ended. Perhaps a few people had outlived Harry, but he had seen where wizards and muggles were going. Though the wizards may have died off first, it seemed obvious that the muggles would soon follow them. After all, during the twenties, Wizarding Hunters had predominantly attacked hospitals. Advanced curses were developed that targeted the babies and mothers of anyone entering the hospital. Pregnancy became nearly nonexistent in muggles by fourties. Humanity, not the separate factions wizards and muggles had created, would likely die off in less than a hundred years.
And Harry Potter was the only one who knew.
