The thing about Harry, Voldemort mused, was that he never did what you expected him to do.

Oh, you could set a trap for him alright, and generally he'd blunder straight into it. The problem was that he'd generally blunder straight back out of it as well, half the time without even realising that he'd walked into a trap in the first place. Like that blasted Mirror of Erised. Two more nights sat in front of the cursed thing and the boy wouldn't have been able to refuse Voldemort's offer of power when they'd met at the end of the year. As it was, there had been a moment's hesitation… but then Harry had gone blundering on, never really realising that he'd just killed a man.

Now that had been the greatest trap of them all. Training Harry. The bumbling fool of a headmaster had also trained Harry, in his way, but Voldemort had done a better job of it. Harry had first killed when he was still in the cradle, but his first conscientious kill was at the age of eleven; Quirrell. Twelve; Tom. The list continued until, not long after his sixteenth birthday, Harry had killed twelve men, seven women and a rather unfortunate dog that had happened to get caught in the cross-fire. That was when the messy-haired hero had had his revelation and discovered that he rather liked killing people.

That, of course, had all gone according to Voldemort's plan. What the Dark Lord hadn't expected was what happened next. Harry had gone on his very first killing spree. In doing so he managed to wipe out the majority of the lower-ranking Death Eaters, Bellatrix Lestrange and made friends with the Lestrange brothers, who had rather too happily helped the teenager in the destruction of their wife/sister-in-law. To be entirely honest, Voldemort couldn't blame them for that.

Voldemort's careful direction, combined with Dumbledore's mystical messages and tenuous training and Snape's somewhat dubious lessons on self-defence made Harry literally untouchable once he reached his majority. Born of one of the oldest pureblood lines and a muggleborn witch who's stubborn realism and determination excelled even that of Snape himself, Harry was extremely powerful and had the willpower to control and temper that power - something that very few others were capable of.

Voldemort couldn't recall when 'that lightning-bolt-scarred brat who bloody-well-won't-die' had become Harry. It had to have been at about the same time that Harry stopped. That had been unusual, as well. The boy saviour had become more and more of an icon to the public, even as the rumours surrounding him became worse and worse. So, on his seventeenth birthday, Harry stopped. He continued to mail a few of his friends, but he refused to go back to Hogwarts.

Dumbledore had been killed by Snape at the end of the previous school year, and many people attributed that to Harry's refusal to return to 'normality', but when the teenager quite cheerfully moved out of his relatives house and moved into a bed and breakfast just down the road from Godric's Hollow, then set about rebuilding his parents' home they began to think otherwise.

Harry did not stop magic. In fact, he probably did more than he ever had before, during the renovations and the multiple layers of very high security wards he placed around his new residence. His snowy white owl was seen with startling frequency at Hogwarts but Harry himself was never seen. His fireplace was illegally connected to the floo network with several passwords and ID requirements to get through to it. And, every once in a while, someone that Harry didn't like disappeared.

First to go was Dolores Umbridge. She went home one night and simply never made it back to her home. Several department ministers, each of them doing a poor job at the best, came next. In each case a note appeared on their desk the following morning which very politely informed whomever might be reading it that their boss/employee/friend/partner/annoying pain in the arse was soon to be six feet under, followed by a mild suggestion on who might do a better job.

Needless to say from that point on the ministry workers lived in constant fear of being the next one to go. That fear was stopped only a couple of months after the first disappearance when Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, was found dead at his desk with a now very familiar note telling the wizarding population that no one else was on the hitlist, but could everyone behave civilly, please? The method of the minister's death was very obvious; a cylindrical lead object, no larger than the end of a grown man's pinkie finger, had been blown into Fudge's chest with considerable force. It took a lot of research to find out that the weapon of choice was a muggle 'gun'.

Hermione, it was said, had taken one look at the minister's body and had bitten her tongue with enough force to make it bleed and had turned an odd red colour as she tried not to laugh at the irony of it. No one else understood the irony until the entire knowledge of the cause of death was discovered.

It was a clever and brutal take over that undermined completely Voldemort's attempts to similarly. Likewise, not two weeks into the new school year both of the Carrows disappeared, although Snape himself only seemed to be a little more stressed out than usual over the next couple of days.

As this process took place everyone waited and wondered what would happen next. Voldemort should surely retaliate? He did, though Harry stopped him yet again in a way no one expected. It was the first Saturday of the Christmas holidays and Diagon Alley was chock-a-block with tourists, shoppers and loiterers. So Voldemort had appeared - seemingly from nowhere, though in fact he'd floo'd in - and launched a mid-day attack.

Harry had heard about it at very short notice, sauntered into the market place and then quite calmly shot Voldemort through the leg. Haphazardly waving a gun in one hand, a wand in the other and with a bright, translucent purple shield sparkling around him, stopping any and all curses getting in, but none from getting out, Harry posed quite daunting figure. Which was a cue to all the Death Eaters to scarper. The Lestrange brothers stuck around long enough to exchange 'Hello's and 'How-do-you-do's before they, too, apparated away.

Then Harry had picked Voldemort up bridal style and disapparated back to his newly furnished home in Godric's Hollow.

Over the following week the teenager nursed Voldemort's leg back to health and, after a bit of pottering around and meddling things which - with a Potion's Owl result such as his - really oughtn't be meddled with, Harry successfully returned Voldemort's appearance to his early twenties, with the exception of the crimson eyes that remained a stubborn red, even when the Dark Lord had been accidentally reverted to being a two year old.

What, exactly, Harry hoped to achieve from all this, no one knew. Especially not Voldemort himself.


Written: 1st March 2009
Chances of continuation: nil

Feel free to use this piece of writing for whatever the hell you want, so long as you credit me (either this account or my main one - Calistabelle) and let me know what you do with it.

Much love,
Cal