His magic writhes and rolls inside of him like a boiling sea. His body feels hot and twisted like it is not his own.

His fear had been right, Magic had deemed his joy at seeing his parents to be the beginning of a courtship and now he was suffering for it, so far from his Alpha.

And no one would know, could ever be allowed to know. He might leap through a wall of fire if it meant saving another but he was not going to put up a wall of fire to act as his obstacle course. Omegas had been used to hurt their True Alphas all the time and that was just in the Muggle world, with magic anything was possible.

Anything.

So he hides it. Hides away from stares, buries the part of him that thought of Voldemort as Alpha so deep inside of him even he would find it hard to find. No, it is simply the thought of his parents' murderer returning from the dead that is killing him, nothing less, nothing more. He is prepared to give life to his lie completely, scrounging up money bits by bits, calling upon every little bit of smart in him to hide the fact that he strolled down the winding ways to the bypass so he could buy the suppressants he would need soon enough.

He can pretend, he can play his role.


But then he breaks.

He unravels so easily under the pain. The flayed sensation he feels under his sternum grows and burns, the separation driving him mad.

He wonders if Voldemort feels it. The pain should be mutual, a bond being stretched too thin but Voldemort has twisted himself so beyond the limits of humanity that Harry is unsure if he is still an Alpha. Has he numbed himself to that part of him? The Tom he knew briefly might have done so, thinking it to be a weakness to have instincts that governed him.

Harry doesn't think Voldemort realises. And even if he did, what good would it do? It didn't change that he wanted to kill Harry. Didn't change the fact that the courtship would never be carried out in full.

So, Harry is going to die. He has read the literature, the ever so fragile Omegas broke under the strain, their brains giving out first as the pain wreaked havoc on their empathetic instincts and then the Alphas either followed them into death or survived as hollow shells of themselves. He figures that Voldemort would fall in the latter category, he doesn't seem much more than a hollow shell of rage and hate any way. But there has never been a case like theirs, at least not in the books that Harry has read so the exact time when he would snap he can't quite tell. Not from proof anyway.

But that little niggling sensation in the back of his mind that had told him all those years ago that he was an Omega when he hadn't even known what the word meant told him he had until his first Heat. His seventeenth birthday.

Yes, Harry is going to die in little more than two years. And he hasn't even begun to live yet.

But there is so much he wants to do, so much world he wants to see. He can't just leave it like this, can't die like this when all that would be left of his life was the remembrance that he was once the Boy-Who-Lived.

That want that he feels, that he hides, it burns hotter than ever. Strange how freeing the thought of death can be. How a limit on years can break the limits one places on oneself in mind.

Now, Harry has practically no time left. It makes him think, you know? Makes him think hard and long about exactly why his True Alpha was a mass murderer. All those things he didn't let himself think because they would lead to questions he didn't want to know the answer to. That somehow against all odds, his biology has chosen the one who wants him murdered, the one he had vanquished instead. Somehow Magic had wanted them together so badly that it took the smallest gesture, borne out of coincidence rather than intent as a courting gift.

So Harry lets himself wonder,

What kind of person is he then, that he is so vehemently matched with a monster?

And finally he lets himself answer that question.

A monster but of a different kind.

And with that thought, the Boy-Who-Lived, the Saviour, the Chosen One, dies.


Perhaps it actually is pure happenstance that he thinks this just second, seconds, before Petunia yells out for him weed the garden. But with the happening in the last year, the last few years in fact, he doesn't believe in happenstance or coincidence anymore. Divine or not, this he does not know but it certainly feels like intervention by deities of some kind.

He is a monster himself, this he admits.

He is dying, this he knows.

And as Petunia practically wrenches his arm out its socket to get him to 'pick his lazybones self up', he cannot take two more years of returning to this hellhole, this he decides.

He will be rid of them one way or another. He digs deep beyond the survival instinct the Dursleys cultivated in him, into the darkest abysses of his mind to the hate he feels for them and slowly, deliberately, he resolves to kill them. Death is the way he chooses to be rid of them.


He plans. It will take time, time he does not truly have but he needs it to be perfect, airtight. Make it so there can be no excuse Dumbledore or anyone uses to send him back to that house or anything resembling it.

There has to be no chance of them surviving.

It is made difficult with the sudden and infuriating knowledge that he is being watched. He knows he's being followed because he can smell butterbeer, knows he isn't imagining it because in the state of distress and separation all food smells make him nauseous and once he starts looking for signs there are plenty. He sees things, imprints on grass as if someone is still there, sounds of backfiring cars that sound like the cracks of noise he hears in Hogsmeade when witches and wizards apparate away. Probably Dumbledore's people, the Death Eaters would have killed the Muggles and made this whole thing a lot easier. But easy wasn't something Harry dealt in anyway.

Besides, it would be more satisfying to do it himself.

And witnesses to prove his innocence would be useful.


He starts by going to the church.

There used to be a time when the local library was where Harry went to hide. Then the management changed and the new librarian and manager were friends of Petunia's and that stopped quickly. He had found the church then. It was quiet and the pastor or vicar or whoever, he didn't mind Harry being there despite all the rumours he was bound to hear about him. Once, many years ago he had asked the man if it was okay for him to be there if he wasn't religious or baptised or anything. The man had said a simple faith was enough for him. As long as there was something that Harry believed in, he was in the right place. And if he didn't have anything to believe in then he was more than welcome to look for it there.

It was a pretty speech. Harry didn't care though, he just wanted a quiet place.

Now, though, now he was going there for a different reason.

"I'm conflicted."

"What's wrong?"

"My cousin he...When it was just me I could make excuses for him but he's going others hurt at this rate. But I can't jus-" A sigh echoes between the empty pews. " They'd never forgive me."

"If you don't, could you forgive yourself?"

"No, but...no one will believe me anyway." Another sigh cuts through the silence. "I need to get back home."

Petunia never likes it when he goes to church. He usually tries to hide it from her for the same reason but now, well, now her anger serves his purpose.

"One of your kind going to church, it's not natural." She says, sniffing in that ridiculous manner of hers.

"You know the pope who really brought the witch hunts about, made them official and all that by issuing a papal bull, he was...one of my kind." Petunia squawks and Harry smirks in response, "But he was weak and couldn't do much of," Harry swirled his fingers and barely hid laughter as her face paled. She didn't need to hear the word to think Magic.

"A strange thing jealousy. Can you imagine? Wanting so bad to be something until you begin to hate others who can be that? Turning that jealousy into hate, that hate into genocidal tendencies. Can you imagine?"

Harry knows well she doesn't need to imagine. He hasn't forgotten the bitter way she'd spoken of 'Perfect Lily' back on that day ages ago when Hagrid had brought his letter to him.

The row that follows once Petunia tells Vernon of how disrespectful 'the boy' was probably heard throughout the neighbourhood. It earns him a black eye that he 'hides' in the most conspicuous manner. And in the dark of night he sends out his things to Ron with a letter all about how scared he was that his Uncle would break them. He stays awake, keeps a discreet eye out on the garden and sees the moment Hedwig is intercepted, her packages shrunk and visibly lightened with featherlight charms before being sent back on her way again.

The stage is finally set and so Harry begins his play.


The best lies are always set in reality. And it just so happens that the reality is that Dudley is a small time drug dealer. A small time drug dealer who wants to break into the big leagues.

It is easy to nudge him, tell him of tales of people who manage to make heroin, suppressants, crystal meth and more, with little more than chemistry kits. Dudley does the work for him, throwing a tantrum until Vernon buys him the biggest, most expensive chemistry kit on the market, the one that comes with all kinds of warnings that Dudley ignores.

After that, it is easy. There are a million tv shows that talk all about how dangerous even the simplest of household products can be when in the right combination. It doesn't take much for Harry to figure out exactly what is the right combination and suggest them to Dudley discreetly, insinuate what things he needed to search for on his new computer. All that is left is to wait.


It's a weekend, all the Dursleys are home and no one will wake up early. Petunia wakes him up to tell him to get started on breakfast, scowls when she sees there are no eggs. She gives him an exact change of 95p to get eggs from the local supermarket, tells him to be quick about it and goes back to sleep, stopping only to roll her eyes at the neighbour who is out weeding her garden and complain about the lazy boy.

Such a pity that he already has the bacon going. Such a pity that Dudley had been messing about with dangerous things in his room. Such a pity that it takes Harry so long at the supermarket, suddenly leaving the eggs there at the cashier as he worries because he thinks that Petunia, in her hurry to go back to sleep, switched the burner off but accidentally left the gas on.

Such a pity that when he returns to the house, out of breath and mad with 'worry', he finds it going up in flames, just in time to see the second floor collapse onto the ground floor as something in Dudley's room causes a mighty explosion that has the blazing debris being propelled into the neighbour's house and even hitting Harry in his shoulder as he stands on the pavement shocked into stillness.

The fire engines come soon, wrapping Harry in blankets as he shivers from the 'shock', a paramedic attending his arm, carefully noting his mad babbling as he talks to himself about how this is all his fault, he should have told someone, he knew Dudley was doing something dangerous but he didn't think it was something like this.

If the neighbour overhears while she's being treated for her burns, she doesn't show it.

And when the kind firemen come over to tell Harry in soft voices that they were very sorry but his family didn't survive he buries his head in his hands and in that tightly wound, dry way of a blooming Alpha, Harry Potter 'sobs'. He feels that stretchy aching feeling under his sternum lessen, feels blood wards that once kept him 'safe', collapse and the sudden feeling of his magic becoming free, almost bursting out of him with the equivalent of a relieved sigh and in the safe cradle of his hands he smiles.

Yes, it's such a pity.