Disclaimer: Such a shame it isn't mine. Would've been different by my design.

Summary: A Dark Future for Harry. Imprisoned and forgotten by the world, what will he become? Harry Potter no longer exists.

Author Note: This story was originally published under the name of Despair. I completely rewrote it, there are a few lines that are from the original and the basic premise is the same. Read this and I'll leave the old on up for a while to let you compare if you'd like. This story is dark, or will be in time. It's from somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind that rarely come out.
I changed the title because I thought it fit better

New Beginnings

• eQuasarus •

Chapter 1

• Thoughts •

People.

People are hopeless.

I never used to think so.

I used to think that they could get through anything.

They can't.

The weak rely on the strong. That is how things have always worked. That is how it will always work.

If the strong are evil, then, no matter how people think it works, evil wins.

I was stronger.

I survived.

It's funny to think that once, I was him. A boy, no older than 12 asked me what it was like to be him and it surprised me.

It should have known then.

A great writer once said. "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

Now I understand the truth of it, just as he did. He understood that in life I would fail. He didn't know me, he was before my time, but he knew my story. He knew my story even if he did not write it.

I am a character in a book that ended a long time ago, and I ended with it.

If I could take it all back I would. I would start from the beginning and embrace what I could have been.

No, it is not so. I can't go back and I won't. I've felt enough pain in my lifetime.

To see daylight, to see the sun rise above the cold waters that surround me, that would be a sight.

It's been a long time since I've seen any light from outside.

They're afraid of what I might do. If I were to get a breath of air then I would not be recaptured.

It's true.

They should be afraid.

Soon, soon I'll have a chance.

I was never normal. From the day I was born I knew it. Every day I was careful, I pushed away things I would be punished for and hid thoughts that weren't right. Until the day my life changed.

The overgrown man with his untamed beard and worn clothing came.

He took me away from it as a white horse might do in a fairy tale.

I found a new home, a place where people loved me.

But, alas, my story did not end there.

There is no happily ever after, not for me, and not for any of those fools who hurt me.

Endless trials appeared, but I overcame them and continued fighting. A man molded me. He watched me carefully and guided me through my life, without my knowledge. Three people died because he allowed it, because I needed to become the hero.

A hero.

Ha!

I became what he made me. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't easy. I grew slowly, never stopping. Trials appeared in my life but I always overcame. I never knew defeat. As a child I might've run. But I no longer, it was not in my path and so even had I tried I would have been sucked back in. I never knew defeat, never knew what it was like to lose.

They captured me eventually, as was my fate.

Voldemort.

Fool. He thought that I might perhaps have some secrets locked within me that he could use.

For months he pushed my limits without killing me. He sought something which he could not have and he refused to accept it.

I would not break, I had a single thought that ran through my mind as I was endlessly tortured and it kept me from breaking. It kept me alive.

Again, it was not to be.

Before I was able to escape they found my Achilles' heel.

She was supposed to be hidden. I never doubted that she'd be hidden from their grasp forever, but history repeated itself and a friend betrayed my trust as had once happened with my father.

He'd broken, it was his fault she was here.

When I saw her there, crying in complete agony, I offered myself to them. For her life I would have slit my own throat.

They didn't listen.

As I watched the person who I loved more than anything else in the world tortured I felt like dying myself. They left her with me, left her to die in my arms. I knew what pain she was in and what pain she would go through if she lived and so I took it from her, I took the pain away.

I once doubted myself.

No longer.

She would have died.

Even here, now, I know that.

In my life I lost many things: my godfather, close friends, my first love. But they were nothing; there was nothing comparable to having to lose her, to having to loose her from her bounds in life. She'd stood by me through everything, never wavering, keeping me strong.

When he came for me I hid her. I entrusted my closest friend with her secret and hid her from the world.

When she died, something inside me died. I no longer am the person I once was. I couldn't have controlled it even if I had tried, I changed.

Rage.

Anger.

Pure unquestioned hate.

Not a single person left the castle I was imprisoned in.

Men, woman, children, pureblood or mudblood, it didn't matter. The prisoners with them, I felt nothing for no one anymore.

Yes. I did it.

For months I claimed otherwise. The ministry wouldn't listen.

To the people, I was a hero who defied the odds. To the ministry, I was only an unacceptable risk. They killed me. While I was detained and resurrected from near death, they manipulated the media and said I was dead. Somehow I lived, through my torment of her death I continued to live.

So they brought me here.

It's like a nightmare, an unending nightmare where I have lived for too long.

When I first came here there was nothing but pain. I screamed I hadn't, that I was innocent. But they'd heard it before and they'd hear it again, I was no different to them.

But I did do it. I knew it without a doubt. I remembered the vivid look on Voldemort's face as he met his fate.

Sirius told me once that the key to staying sane here was remembering a key moment and sticking to it. He'd also had his animagus form to help. I didn't, not then, not in the beginning.

I had that look. Death, fear, hate and loathing.

That phase passed quickly. I sunk into despondency. I anguished over what I had done and whether I should have done it. I tried desperately to kill myself, and luckily I was unable to.

Lucky for me.

The anguish phase passed quicker than the first and I became hard, terribly hard. I escaped once, but they caught me quickly. The first time was an awakening, I became aware that I could do things, things I shouldn't have been able to do.

I wasn't even sure of it myself at first.

By that time I was hallucinating, seeing things when I was alone, muttering things that I shouldn't be muttering. My clothing grew back. After being in there so long my clothing had started to fall apart from the wear of life, the constant rubbing against the rocks of the cell I was caged in.

It was odd that things happened and I only see them now, looking back. They say that hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

When the dementors passed I would hide myself in the farthest corners, pushing back as hard as I could so that I would not feel the pain. I imagined myself as a tiny bug that could move through the prison and do what I wanted to do. One day it just happened. I awoke and I was small. I was so tiny that I could fit through the grooves in the worn floor. I simply crawled away, spending hours making it out of the prison.

I came to the waters edge, to the my freedom.

I became myself again, knowing that I could not swim in my tiny form. But I hesitated. I looked out at the sea and I wasn't sure if I could swim it; if I could stay alive.

Unfortunately, I was spotted.

I awoke in my cell, thinking I had had a vivid hallucination or a dream.

They brought him.

The Judas.

He stood there, just outside my reach, chiding me in his own way. He spoke quietly, he wasn't the same person I had once known. But I already knew that, he was a traitor. He was my Judas.

He asked me, of all things, what she would have done. He said that she would never have let me act this way.

I discovered something else about myself right then. I felt it, I could see myself do it. It was the second time that I had done such a thing, but the first time I was so out of control that I had not even noticed I'd done it.

In my heated rage I cast a spell on him.

I had no wand. It was lost in the rubble of a now dead and crumbling castle, somewhere amidst the bones of two hundred other people.

I didn't do it purposefully, though I would have had I had a choice.

All the same, I did it, and I knew how I did it. After they dragged me off of him I could feel it deep inside.

He may have lived but now he'll be eternally cursed to wear my mark. A jagged lightning bolt would adorn his face now until the day he dies. That is, however, only a matter of time.

The events that had happened where explained by a foolish dementor. After all, I was not powerful enough to walk through the cells of the magical bars that kept me in place. They didn't understand, they didn't see how powerful I was.

When I was again confined to my cell I found myself at peace. I no longer heard the screams of my beloved every time I closed my eyes. I no longer saw myself pulling the life from her in order to save her from suffering. I no longer saw the child she'd hidden from the world and even from me.

I could see that thing that the dementors fed on. I could see it as plain as I saw the dementors. It was a sort of mist that filled the air. There were other things too. The bars that confined me where filled with magic and I could draw on it

The dementors watched me. I was a new thing for them. No matter how many of them came they could not take from me that which I would not allow.

Aurors came and went.

No one knew what was happening. They tried speaking to me, but I only ignored them, willing myself to do things, slowly becoming more powerful. I didn't escape again right away. I knew that should I do it again I would have to insure it was done right or I would never have the chance again.

The Aurors who came stationed themselves near my door so that they could watch me. The dementors could not discover my secret but they were determined to.

For months I sat on the floor of my small cell without moving. Not that anyone else saw. I copied myself into an inanimate form, leaving a dried body to take my place while I wandered through the cells invisible. The prison had been designed long before and though on occasion the charms were reapplied they were never done so with the same skill as they had been.

The bars couldn't hold me.

I was nearly caught many times. It was hard for me to hold myself invisible for long, it drained my magical power quickly and I couldn't discover a plentiful supply of it. I stole the magic from the Aurors slowly, keeping myself filled with magic. I stretched myself, filled myself over and over again, pushing more and more in.

Slowly one by one the Aurors would leave, and new ones would come. I never saw the same Auror twice.

When I finally plotted my escape again I was careful. Walking through the bars was easy. Walking past the Aurors was easier. They just stared down at my copy, never once thinking that perhaps it wasn't me. When I was close enough I could even make it move, just enough that they knew I was alive.

Passing the dementors was harder.

When I roamed the cells I was always careful to avoid the dementors. They usually stayed in pairs when roaming around, but then they seemed to have a way that kept the halls all within reach, spread out symmetrically. When I ran into one, they were all hard to avoid. I may have been able to pass through bars, but that was only because they were made of magic.

When I planned my escape I planned it based around the movements that I had kept track of. They shouldn't have been roaming near the front of the prison, but they were. I hid, but still it wasn't enough. I took another cell, keeping its current occupant sedated. I mixed my own aura with his and stayed away from the door. They passed by, leaving me alone with a muttering man who seemed even more insane than I was.

I left the prison that had become my home.

I left it only to return hours later.

They found out too quick. My copy did not survive long after I left. When it disappeared they sought me out. When I stepped onto the shore they were waiting.

I wasn't prepared for them.

Captured again.

They didn't send in the Judas, no, they had learned a lesson. Instead they brought a person who I loathed just as much.

My creator. He had always done things for the greater good. Ha! He did things to make sure he won. He manipulated people and their lives because he could not win himself. It was his fault that I fell in love. It was his fault for making me use the same spell that had caused my parents to die. His fault.

I was much more in control when I met him. My rage that before had been uncontrollable didn't seem to exist. It did, simmering beneath the surface.

He asked me if I thought that I should be doing this. If, though everything that I had done in life, I thought I was taking the right path. I didn't answer.

Truthfully I'd never really had a choice. He laid it all out, step by step. I simply walked the path he chose. When I strayed he brought me back. First, it was by letting a boy named Cedric Diggory die. He didn't mean to let him die, no, he was only trying to show me the truth. But it meant that Cedric died.

It happened from the beginning. Far before I met him he controlled my life. My Aunt and Uncle were given custody of me and he watched, from a distance as I grew up. He introduced me to Judas; he insured that I found my love. He was my creator.

I was hard. I hated evil; it did many things to me. But he was not evil; at least, he claimed not to be. Always for the good of the world. Always for the betterment of others. He told me what I wanted to hear. Whispered sweet nonsense in my ears when I needed it most.

He was a puppeteer.

I told him to shove it as he walked away, in not so courteous terms. I've learned many things since I started my own path and patience is one of them.

Finding no alternative they decided I was no longer salvageable and they tried to cut their losses.

They made me.

Through their needs I was born. Because of their non-ability to fight that thing which would have conquered them. They created me at first through stories, and then through actions. They created the monster that they now faced.

They tried to destroy me.

They created me and they tried to kill me. It would never work, they molded me to well. They found the person who could become powerful enough. That was their mistake.

When the Dementor came into my cell I was there. I could no longer fool them with a fake body to take my place. The others left, those who were present disappeared, leaving in a orderly line. I didn't wonder why for long. A dementor, the only thing which had stayed, reached up and started to pull his hood away.

His hood.

"The Dementors lowers its hood only to use its last and worst weapon. They call it the Dementor's kiss." Those words of a once loved mentor echoed in my head as I saw the hood moving slowly up, revealing the face of death.

Grotesque was the only way to describe it. I thought of a decaying face I'd once seen when I was being tortured. One of the other prisoners had died in the cell next to mine and they let him sit, rotting where he'd died. This face reminded me of that.

It bowed its head, stooping to my level and reached down to grab me.

I lost all control at that moment and something happened. I do not know what happened, I do not care to know. The thing is no more. The moment before it administered its deadly kiss the room around me seemed to explode and that monster which had stood before me, turned to ashes.

So now I sit here, in a box.

Where it is I am not sure.

There is no entrance, there is no exit.

There is no light, only darkness.

My food appears in the middle of the room, twice a day. I eat and it is gone again.

I see no one.

No living things comes into my cell.

They're afraid.

They're all afraid.

This monster they created will escape one day and they'll know true fear.

They'll lose the ones they loved most.

They'll suffer as I did.

My Judas will know pain. He'll know the feeling of ultimate betrayal.

Ron Weasley, whose head now bears a scar like mine will see why I still live on.

They'll know the name of my love. Hermione.

They'll know that she died because they were cowards and could not protect themselves.

I was once the boy whose lives they put their hands in.

But that boy does not exist anymore.

Harry Potter is dead.

I've taken a new name.

So? What do you think?

As with everything else: Should I continue?

eQuasarus