"I need a tent," Harry announced as he walked through the door.
"Harry Potter!" The salesman gasped, "It's an honor, I'm sure we've got just the tent you need around here somewhere. We just got some in last week that would be perfect for the discerning traveler like yourself. Six bedrooms spread across two stories, you'll have all the amenities of home wherever you find yourself going."
Harry held up his hand to stop the man. "No thank you. I just need one bedroom, a kitchen and a loo."
"You want a walkup?" The salesman was aghast. "But the art of making Wizarding tents has advanced so much since those days. We can build almost anything you want."
"What I want is a tent containing a small flat with no bells and very few whistles. Just show me the simplest one you have in stock. But I'll tell you what, answer a few questions for me and I'll make up the difference in your commission. Sound fair?" Harry jiggled his money bag meaningfully. "Since the space inside isn't fully in this dimension can anyone outside tell what's going on inside?"
Light dawned in the salesman's eyes and he cracked a boyish smile, "Ah... Setting up a bit of a hideaway are we? I remember being that age. All of our tents come with built in silencing charms so no matter what kind of noises you or your guests end up making you won't have to worry about speculative looks from the neighbors so long as you're discreet. Just remember to cast your protection spells first or your love nest may get a little crowded, know what I mean?"
"Your tents block underage magic detection? Seems to me that sort of thing ought to cost extra."
The salesman shrugged, "Don't rightly know, I've never heard of anyone testing that specifically. I do know however that magic is tracked by where it was cast not by the individual wand. Just make sure your illicit rendezvous happen a good distance from your home and there'll be nothing to worry about."
"Nice to know, now how about we look at a few tents and I'll chime in with questions as they come to me?"
00000
Hermione was sitting on his trunk when Harry arrived back in Godric's Hollow. The bright witch helped him up as he fell flat on his face from the floo and the two locked eyes.
"You're in my house," Harry challenged.
"And you're not in Scotland," Hermione pointed out.
"Yes but you don't need permission to not be somewhere. So who else knows you're here?"
"I told my mother I wanted to go hiking today so I could look for potions ingredients and she dropped me off in Princetown," she promised. "So no one I guess."
Harry shrugged, "Welcome to my home then. It suits me in a weird way."
"It's a dump!" Hermione protested.
"And so am I, we've both been neglected, forgotten, abused and now we're both falling apart at the seams." Harry gave a wry chuckle, "As I said, it suits me. So what brings the brightest witch of her age into the hovel of a lowly potter?"
"That's not what I meant and you know it!" Hermione fumed, then stopped. "You're baiting me. You want me to be angry, you want me to fight. Why?"
"Later," Harry brushed it away. "First you can tell me why you tracked me down and we'll settle all the whys and what not later."
"First, I came because I am your friend and you clearly need someone to help you. Second I came because I wanted to know what was going on," now Hermione blushed a bit, "And third you can't just kiss a girl like that and just walk away!"
Harry smiled like the cat that caught the canary. "Apparently I can, whether or not I should is an entirely different question. As for my needing help and what is going on, that's the answer to why I've been baiting you."
Harry stood up and gestured around the room with a manic glint in his eye, "What I'm doing is hitting bottom, testing just how far I can really go. I learned something recently. I had a vision of just what I'm made of but it was gone in an instant. Now I am going to systematically destroy myself until it truly cannot get any worse. When I find that place... I'll know who I am, what I'm capable of, and exactly where my limits are. I'll finally show the world who Harry Potter really is."
"And the kiss?" Hermione asked meekly, only half sure she really wanted to know.
"The first step to hitting bottom is to forget the rules. I do what I want because that's what I want to do. Rules be damned, if I'm going to learn anything about myself I cannot care when other people's feelings get hurt." Harry was stalking the room now, slowly circling his friend as he passionately ranted. "I kissed you because I felt like it. Nothing more or less. It was fairly satisfying and I might try something like that again some day but for now I've got to focus on now. Hells Bells, 'now' is what this whole thing is about! In the end Voldemort will keep trying to kill me until one of us is dead permanently, if it's me that does the dying I sure as hell don't want to die never having lived!"
"What do you mean, learning about yourself?" She asked him. "If you don't know yourself, who does?"
"Why do you ask? Why do you want to know?" Harry challenged. "Do you want to learn because it's part of who you really are, or because your parents expected you to? You place so much faith in other people, especially those in positions of authority. Why? Do you trust them because you respect them, or because of the position they hold? You blindly follow the rules, but who made the rules? Who decides what's right for you? Are you going to let others tell you how to live your life, or will you wake up and start making decisions for yourself?"
Hermione looked at her friend with new eyes. All that power, the passion, the uncontrolled and defiant spirit... He was both incredibly scary and incredibly attractive. It was like staring at a button that would destroy the world. She knew that one wrong step could destroy everything, but at the same time she was drawn to act. As soon as he passed by again Hermione grabbed him by the front of his robes and kissed him. It started as just a simple peck on the lips but as Harry kissed her back she got bolder and nearly shoved her tongue down his throat. As they broke apart she gave a little gasp and stared into his intense green eyes, "Fuck the rules, I liked it too."
00000
After days spent patching the roof and door with repaired or transfigured materials, Harry started to spend his time in the basement trying to remember every Potions class he had attended with Neville Longbottom. Bubbling away in a cauldron he had enlarged for the experiment was one of Neville's more disastrous failures. Madam Pomphrey had needed to treat almost the entire class after the potion exploded showering some with shards of cauldron and leaving the rest breathing poisonous vapors. At first Harry had been a bit hesitant about this particular plan but he held fast to his decision to do what he pleased and he knew deep in his heart that nothing in the world could please him more than destroying Number Four once and for all. If the Dursleys died too, heh bonus points...
As soon as the potion began to boil furiously out of control, Harry cast a stasis charm to hold it exactly as it was. When he released it, or when it expired on it's own, the chain reaction would continue as it had begun and in no time at all the cauldron would explode in a frenetic orgy of kinetic doom. The wards around Number Four were almost singing with welcome as Harry snuck back in under cover of darkness. He could almost believe that they were alive and sharing his anticipation. Harry placed the enlarged cauldron into the cupboard under the stairs just as the featherweight charm he had cast expired. Taking this as his cue, Harry nearly ran out of the back door and jumped on his broom.
He was not even a mile away when he heard he muffled thump and watched the sky light up with an orange flash that indicated his childhood prison was no more. He didn't even bother checking for survivors, he no longer cared.
He was sickened by how little the idea of killing the Dursley family bothered him. Shouldn't he have some sort of inborn desire not to hurt people? Eventually he gave up trying to feel bad. Some people just needed to die. Killing Voldemort would be more troublesome for him than the Dursleys, another epiphany that disturbed him at first. Voldemort had killed his parents and tried to kill him, but the Dursleys were just walking scum. They seemed to have seniority on his "better dead" list for some reason.
00000
Unfortunately for her parents, Hermione had chosen to disappear with Harry. She'd returned the first day but eventually her curiosity won out. She just reappeared one day with a sleeping bag and Harry made no mention of it. He spotted her picture on several posters when he went into town for food but didn't mention it to her. She was still too attached to the idea that self discovery was something she could just pick up or put down on a whim. Had she known she might have tried to contact her parents and reassure them, something that would surely end her quest.
Now that the roof was patched, the house began to dry out bit by bit. Hermione of course tried to save the family library and spell books but most of them were just too far gone. The house became littered with parchment and paper as she would find a page here and there that were still half legible. Those she separated from the rest to dry flat so as to preserve what little was left.
Slowly she became obsessed with the little snippets she could decipher. The Potters had not been lax once they left school and she found a variety of half completed drawings and theories about what Voldemort had done to himself. As she read some of them, they clicked in her mind and she got a few ideas about where Harry could start if he wanted to match the Dark Lord in power.
She shrieked in surprise and fear when she found him kneeling in front of the fireplace, a look of desperate pain on his face as a red hot poker was pressed into his chest. "Oh my God, Harry what are you doing?"
For a moment Harry didn't respond except to hiss as he pressed the heated metal harder. Then he gave a howl of rage and frustration as he hurled the poker across the room hard enough to make it stick into the opposite wall.
"I will control it!" He protested to no one, "I have the power, so why can't I use it? Sure, I'm stronger than I used to be but this is nothing compared to what I can be. I will possess it, I will conquer it, I will be that power!"
"Harry, what's going on?"
"I know that I am much more powerful than the magic I can access right now. When I kicked my fat uncle, he was actually lifted off the ground and I barely felt the effort. Now I stub my toe on a pebble and it hurts. I've got to find a way to unleash that power permanently."
She held up the papers she had been salvaging, "I think I might have a way. Voldemort completed several rituals to make himself more powerful and your parent's were doing research to figure out what they were. If we can recover enough of their notes, we might be able to do the same to you..."
"No," Harry said with a tone of finality. "The Dark Arts are for weaklings and pissants who want to rush their way to the top."
"Are you saying Voldemort was a weakling?" Hermione asked in a shock.
"No, he was just lazy," Harry told her.
"How can you say that? He's the second most powerful wizard in the world after Dumbledore."
"Crucio," Harry cursed Hermione and held her under the unforgivable for a few seconds before letting her go. "So simple, it only takes three syllables and a flick to put someone completely at your mercy. I didn't have to do anything other than want you to hurt and you did. Any idiot with a wand can cast the unforgivable curses and rituals are nothing but a checklist and a recipe. The power of the Dark Arts is little more than a crutch, any competent wizard can do so much more with less. If I wanted you to feel pain, I could take our very first transfiguration lesson and turn all these splinters into needles. A levitation spell would see the air so thick with metal slivers you couldn't move without impaling yourself. If I wanted you to burn I might heat the needles first. Or freeze them. Or maybe electrify them. A powerful wizard can torture someone any number of ways, he does not need a crutch used by amateurs and incompetents. A killing curse will strike a person dead in an instant but using a tickling charm to kill takes power and creativity. The Dark Arts cannot show you what you are really made of, they can only give you shortcuts and crutches."
"Why?" Hermione gasped from the floor. "I thought I was your friend."
"Because some knowledge can only be properly learned when you experience it first hand," Harry put his wand away and walked out of the room. "I will become all that I can be, but when I kill Voldemort it will be because I am better than him, not because I performed more rituals or got him with one lucky shot."
00000
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Hermione pestered Harry.
"Of course it is, before I can play my strengths I have to know what they are," He promised, "now shut up. I'm trying to be sneaky here."
"But Harry, you're talking about arson."
"Yes, I'm talking about arson," He fixed her with a powerful stare. "They've slandered me, belittled me, made me a monster and hailed me as a king. Not to mention the millions of galleons they've made by selling my name. I haven't seen a knut and I don't particularly feel like letting it continue. Besides all of their offenses against me, the Daily Prophet is the single worst offender when it comes to telling others what to think or do."
"But I thought this quest thing was all about you!" She complained. "Why do you have to destroy the Prophet?"
"It is about me and I've discovered three things this week. Firstly I really don't like the Prophet. I had to read several of them to try to form an unbiased opinion but I discovered that it truly is absolute rubbish. Secondly I discovered that while I'm normally pretty nice, I like revenge as much as the next person. Call it a guilty pleasure if you must. And finally I discovered that I quite like helping others," Harry smiled viciously. "And this is one of those times I can take care of all three at once. This is for their own good. Just like when I tortured you, it will be unpleasant at first and people will scream, but in the end they will be better off."
Heading off anymore argument, Harry jammed his crowbar under the latch on the window and heaved. The wood split with a crack, but it was no louder than someone apparating and he hoped that no one would pay attention to it. Sliding the window open, he slipped inside and motioned for Hermione to toss him his bag. Now that he was inside he could hear the steady clacking and shuffling of the old presses cranking out copies of the morning news. He pulled out his first jerry can of petrol from the magically expanded bag and started splashing it into offices as he made his way down the corridor towards the printing room. The fumes were fairly thick when Harry kicked open the last door only to find he was not alone in the building. One of the Patil twins, Padma from her name plate, was staring out the window (probably working on an astronomy assignment he decided) and only occasionally glancing towards the machines to make sure nothing had gone wrong. Harry was still trying to decide what to do with her when she noticed him.
"Harry Potter? What are you doing here?" She asked as she came around from behind her desk.
"That depends really, if I gave you a kiss and asked you nicely would you leave the building quickly and never look back?"
"Huh? I can't just leave," she protested, "my future is riding on this internship. It doesn't matter how horrid the job really is, I can't just walk away."
"Plan B then," Harry told her without missing a beat. He locked his eyes on hers and concentrated, "Sleep."
She gave a yawn but was otherwise unaffected, "Harry, what are you..."
"SLEEP," He repeated more forcefully. When she still refused to bend to his will, though she was clearly starting to become disoriented, he frowned. "Alright, Plan C."
He grabbed a paperweight off of her desk and thwacked her upside the head causing her to fall unconscious at his feet, "Sorry Padma but I can't leave any magical traces for the Aurors."
Harry finished pouring petrol over the stacks of newspapers and equipment in the room before coming back to his fallen classmate. With a grunt he heaved her over his shoulders as best he could and decided that in the future he would try to get people out of the way first before knocking them out. Rather than going back through the window, Harry and his cargo left through the back door where Hermione had been keeping watch.
"Change of plans," He told her when she looked at him questioningly. "I've decided to try my hand at kidnapping as well, sort of a two for one deal tonight. Set off that rocket and let's get out of here."
