Queensmen
000
In the wake of a V-day that went off without a hitch, Harry Potter picks up the pieces of a broken London and hunts for a reason why, attracting all manner of attention, from all manner of people. Slash. AU. Non-Kingsman!Eggsy.
000
Chapter One
His ears were ringing.
His brain was boiling.
His blood felt like ice.
The world was washed red with violence, with hate, and action. A writhing yawning screaming tide of thrashing bodies, flying blood, broken glass, and the tearing cacophony of a million innocents dying, killing, and withering.
And just as quickly as it had come...
It left.
The acid burn, the throbbing ring, gone.
As if a blind-fold had suddenly been pulled from around their eyes, as if hot water had just been thrown over them.
The world was all at once too bright, and they were drunken prisoners staggering out into the light for the first time in decades, their blood too hot for their bodies as they panted, aching chests heaving as the world orientated, as the light faded...
As they stared at the red washed world around them.
At the broken bodies, and shattered homes, at the world crumbled to fractured confusion and horror at their feet.
Harry James Potter stared around him in numb bewilderment, his heart thundering in his ears like the drumming of a Goblin warband, his blood too hot for his veins, his throat ragged and hoarse, choking on every breath that rasped its way free of his lungs.
Leicester Square.
Painted with gore, filled with bodies.
He coughed on his own breath, shaking violently as he slowly stumbled in a circle, trying to get his bearings, trying to get... get stock on the situation. There were just...
So many bodies.
He coughed, squinting against the blazing light that spun and wove dizzyingly across his vision, he blinked rapidly, trying to focus.
A woman neatly cut in half lay in front of him, her hands were broken bleeding lumps of flesh, her legs were four feet away, her innards spilled out across the pavement like wet tangles of sillystring and seaweed.
Sectumsempra, he categorised in a daze even as his eyes slid to another body. Incendio to the head. There wasn't much of the charred flesh remaining, but if it had been Fiendfyre there wouldn't even have been the charred matchstick like knot upon the charcoal thread he had for a neck.
Odd how most of the bodies were killed via spell damage.
Oh. That was Daphne Greengrass.
Harry stared at his former classmate in mute incomprehension.
What was she doing on this side of the Leaky?
There was a bloodied fork in her hand, and it looked like someone had beaten her head in with a brick. That someone was still holding it, right next to her, with her throat wide open, slashed with a knife as opposed to spell fire. She had stab marks from a fork on her left cheek. Had Daphne tried to rip her eye out with a fork?
Harry looked down at himself, and immediately felt light headed.
Blood.
It was everywhere.
He was painted with gore from foot to head.
He was shaking, he realised distantly, even as he lifted his hands, staring at the slick, dripping scarlet digits in horror. There were bits of flesh under his fingernails. His finger was broken. He couldn't feel it.
He stared around him.
There was something horrible happening in him, he could feel it. A dark, clawing, sensation starting at the pit of his stomach and dragging itself up through his throat, thick and suffocating, raw and dry and heavy, talons digging into his flesh as it heaved itself upwards. Barbed tendrils reaching out and digging into his brain, peeling it back, clawing into him, digging.
He felt an unravelling within him as the numbness, the confusion, the brightness were picked away; threads of thought and feeling coming free, and something terrible approaching, something awful...
I did this.
And he screamed. And screamed. And screamed.
000
There was no sound, no voice, no thought, that prompted him to drag himself to his feet, to wipe his eyes regardless of the blood on his hands. There was no thought, no rationale, no driving need to – he was numb to the core. With neither thought nor emotion to drive him as his aching body moved.
It was just what he did. What he'd always done.
He picked himself up, wiped his tears, and he looked for survivors.
He didn't know what else to do.
A spell upon his cracked glasses, men and women sifted out from under bodies, laid out upon conjured stretchers as he laid Healing spell after Healing spell upon their broken bodies. Levitating a train of the groaning living behind him as he picked through the streets in search of survivors.
Eventually he ended up outside the National Art Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
The fountains were red with blood, bodies choking the water, some were drowned, others were not.
Harry conducted his train of survivors to a stop and began to clear the bodies to one side, laying them out neatly side by side, and then setting his survivors down. He could see men and women in the distance just milling around in a shell shocked stupor and silently picked his way over to them.
He gently wrapped an arm around a young woman, she couldn't have been older than twenty two, her once curly brown hair now lank and ratty with blood as grey eyes stared at him in blank numbness. He guided her back to Trafalgar Square, to the other survivors, and sat her down on the steps leading up to the Gallery, tucking a conjured blanket over her shoulders. And then he went back out.
Distant voices could be heard screaming and crying now as the shock seemed to be fading into horror and pain.
Harry guided men and women back to the Square, tending their injuries, wrapping them in blankets, doing what he could for those he could. Bringing more, and more people to the Square. No longer even caring enough to be shy about his use of magic, he used it openly and often. He conjured water and cloths that he used to clean bloody faces and hands, he healed injuries, broken bones, and torn skin.
Kingsley found him first, limping out of the side-streets, bloodied and grim.
They didn't hug, nor did they speak.
Long, dull looks were exchanged, and Harry kept walking, leaving the Square once again in search of survivors, and Kingsley fell into step behind him.
When they returned, they found that one of the survivors had hotwired one of the near-by cars, they had the doors and windows open, and music playing loudly on the stereo, attracting anyone still in the area.
Hermione found him next, she was limping heavily, and there was a bloody rag tied over one of her eyes, but the moment she saw him, she sprinted across the Square and threw her arms around him, clinging desperately to his bloody form. She trembled violently in his arms.
They raided the Gallery café, bringing out endlessly expanded jugs of tea and coffee for the survivors to nurse.
Food was raided from near-by houses, but no one was willing to leave the rest of the group when the sun began to set. That night, they camped in Trafalgar Square, huddled around campfires that the magic users created. And more people showed up, drawn by the light, welcomed with hot drinks, and blankets, and medical aid. As if stumbling into a dream, or a different world. Confused and dazed, Harry collected them and brought them to the heart of the camp where he washed their faces and hands, where he knitted their skin together and mended their broken bones. Where Hermione fed and watered them and bundled them in kind words and soft blankets. Where Kingsley stood watch, tall and silent, and let them sleep in peace, knowing that they were safe.
With the first rays of dawn, Harry woke, just as numb as yesterday.
And then they dealt with the bodies.
000
Forty million, four hundred and five thousand dead in England alone. Give or take a couple of tens of thousands.
Of that number, twenty five million were killed by magic users.
The secret was well and truly out thanks to Death Day. Fiendfyre still raged across the east end of London, its caster probably long dead, consumed by their own inferno. Until there was a heavy rainfall, there was no way to stop it beyond containment. But as they worked, he and whatever others that could scrape themselves together to help, they found more and more survivors. Shell shocked, injured, or just too scared of what might happen to them in the aftermath of the tragedy.
But under it all, they worked on piles of corpses. On top of mass graves the kind that England hadn't seen since the plagues. There was just no time, no money, and no space to bury them all – no one remaining to even perform the proper funeral preparations to the bodies. Not even to pick them up and transport them properly. What few people that were able to drove piles upon piles of bodies in dump-trucks, vans, pick-ups, and even JCB road diggers to the burn sites. Places like the Kia Oval, Wembley Stadium, and Emirates Stadium became burning grounds. Mounds of corpses, covered in petrol, set on fire, thick greasy black smoke blotting the sky line for days, weeks on end as more and more bodies were fished out of houses, office blocks, railway tunnels, subways.
It was the hospitals and the schools that Harry decides are the worst. Because sometimes... he found survivors.
And the most horrifying thing was that whatever had caused Death Day, whatever had triggered such towering uncontrollable rage, had not worked on the children. Had not worked on the mentally disabled. Had not worked on those with brain trauma.
But it had worked on their parents, on their teachers, on their doctors and their nurses and all those people who were there to help them, protect them, love them.
It is the children, and those souls too lost in their own minds to understand why or how it happened, that tear into Harry the deepest. That hurt him the most.
It only galvanises him to work harder.
They work out of the Gallery and Trafalgar Square, steadily taking over the surrounding buildings. The Square has become a make-shift hospital and soup-kitchen, the Gallery itself now a homeless shelter with beds for anyone who cannot face the thought of returning home, or those who have no home to return to.
Word spreads through London and slowly people come and go.
Things pick up.
But the world is still reeling in the aftermath, and while they try to get their bearings, Harry sits, carefully braiding a silent little girl's long hair as she clutches a bloody teddybear to her chest. And he wants answers.
000
Eggsy wondered what God he must have pissed off in a past life to end up like this.
Barely two weeks out of the joint and the world goes to shit. The two mates he went down to protect killed by his own bare hands. The mum he tried to protect, killed by her own hands; hands that killed the daughter she tried to protect. Protect from the husband that Eggsy killed along with his mates.
He didn't know what to expect when one of the Relief Workers found him. It wasn't like he'd bothered to even try leaving the Black Prince once he'd finished hauling the bodies outside to be picked up like so much trash. Once he'd said his final goodbyes to Ryan and Jamal, once he'd given Dean's body a long hard stare, unable to even muster up a sting of anger toward the pathetic cunt.
He had thought about killing himself, it looked pretty damn attractive at that moment in time, but he'd never been the type of guy to give up. Some small little part of him screamed and railed against the idea of taking his life. Not in fear. But in anger. His mother had given him his life, and she couldn't bear the thought of taking the life of her children, to the point where she couldn't even live with herself after doing so. And even though she was gone, Eggsy knew it would have broken her fucking heart if he followed her like that. He thought of going to help people, but... he doesn't know how to offer, or even ask, and he doesn't think that anyone but the Relief Workers even know what they're doing, or why, and he just can't... muster the drive to get up. To do anything.
So he sits, and he waits. Like everyone else, he decides. Waiting for what, he doesn't know. For the other shoe to drop? For the bodies to stand back up and try to eat their faces? For some fuckin' moustache twirling villain to appear on their TV screens and declare himself the mastermind behind Death Day? It didn't matter what, they were all waiting for it, the fallout, the consequences of that day.
But it doesn't come. Not really.
Unless this is it?
He was young, probably a bit younger than he was, baggy clothes, plain T-shirt and black hoodie, jeans, dirty off-white sneakers, wild black hair, pale skin that's bruised and scabbed, but clean. And those eyes. Fuck. A bottle green thousand yard stare that felt like fuckin' frostbite.
This was their leader according to the rumours.
Those eyes were hard to mistake, even from word of mouth.
Eyes that take him in, bloodied, dirty, crumpled in the corner of a bloodstained booth, not having even bothered to clean himself up, his eyes not quite shellshocked, but hallow and empty. As if someone had scooped the life out of him, torn his soul out, leaving just a husk behind that was barely even human.
He takes him in, meets his eyes, that blank, empty void. And understands. And accepts.
Eggsy thinks he should hate him for it. But he can't muster the energy.
His feet are quiet on the sticky, blood stained floor. Eggsy has made no attempt to clean up after his one man massacre, there are still teeth somewhere, lost in the dried blood congealed across the floorboards.
Green reaches out and takes his hand.
"Come with me," he says, almost gently, almost harshly, and Eggsy can't find it in himself to argue. Green's hand is small, and hot against his skin, and it feels alien. "Come," he repeats, and pulls, just a little.
And Eggsy gets to his feet, because he doesn't care what happens now.
Maybe this is his shoe dropping.
He is lead out of the Black Prince, and into the light of day.
000
Surprisingly dark, no?
I've had this idea for a while now, what if Eggsy hadn't thought to call Harry when he was arrested for Joyriding? What then? Well, Valentine's plan would have probably gone off without much of a problem for one. There will be a lot of stuff happening in this so stay tuned.
I'll explain everything, eventually.