A/N: Well, Rose the Career Tribute is kinda kicking my ass at the moment, since I've just written ten fucking pages as a prequel to her second task (it takes place in the forest over three days and will be fairly violent) and have a long way to go yet. AFF and ROT are the same, and I'm just getting to finishing up the next chappie for prophecy. In short, I was getting confused.
So I decided to take a break from all that, went for a walk around my area and wrote a Harry Potter-Berserk crossover. Because nobody else on this site has done it. Because the parralels of having a hero branded by his nemesis fight against the curse of death planted onto him is too strong to deny. Because fuck it, it'll rock.
Disclaimer: Belongs to JK Rowling and Kentaro Miura. And, because it ain't a cliché yet if you do it first, Hermione will be Casca. Because I can. You want something different, write it yourself.
The Branded One: Stirrings of fate.
He was never a quiet child. From his earliest memories onwards, trouble had dogged his every step. Friends betrayed him, guardians abused him, his cousin hated him and his entire neighborhood feared him thanks to a pack of lies. He honestly could have cared less. He didn't feel anything towards any of his so-called family, former friends and idiotic neighbours. The adults never hit him and the kids, no matter how hard they tried, never got him to emit a sound. He knows there is worse and it's not like normal pain affected him that much anymore, so why react to it?
The most common expression he gives them all is a hard, flat stare.
School is nice enough, he supposes. He is a gifted linguist, according to his teachers, speaking weird variants of French, Spanish and Hindi from day one. He goes on to learn Russian, Hungarian and Chinese in his first year. Physical education leaves him laughing at his instructors. What use is running? You need muscle first, otherwise your life will end at your first locked door. Football? Cricket? What use are those? He never gets good marks, despite being the fittest in the class by the time the first trimester is over. His writing is adequate, his math is average, his music skills are atrocious and shop class is a mixed bag. However, he is a genius when it comes to physics and chemistry. It's uncanny. He doesn't even try hard; it's like he instinctively knows the calculations behind the movement of objects, the way compounds work & interact together... his teacher loves his work. He just looks at her whenever she praises him, not saying a word.
Nobody knows about how he is swinging around a barbell after school, or the weights strapped on his limbs and waist during the day. Even he doesn't know why he does this, really. Only that it feels important.
His relatives have a nasty habit of not feeding him for weeks and months on end when he does something offensive in their eyes. These hissy fits of theirs tended to coincide with a large number of household pets disappearing. Nobody but Dudley makes the connection. Harry eats them raw. He doesn't cook them or skin them properly, just tackles them, snaps their neck and drags them off to the little grove beneath a couple of hedges that mark the limit between Privet drive and everywhere else.
He catches himself staring at his left arm every so often. Sometimes, he wakes up from dreams where all that is left of it is a bandaged stump. He rubs the back of his neck when he's nervous. He occasionally closes his right eye... and forgets to open it again. They feel like old habits, but he knows he's just a kid. How old could such habits really be?
Dudley and his gang get in the habit of chasing him for no reason. They never catch him, no matter how hard they try. Dudley never figures out why, but it's as simple as it is nonsensical to Harry; he can feel it when Dudley's up to something. Like phantom pain, a small jolt in the back of the neck tells him to move whenever he feels it.
Oh, he gets into plenty of fights, but he wins them all. Nobody ever questions just how a child manages to regularly defeat a large group teenagers comprising entirely of teens that are five or six years older than him. Harry just knows how to fight boys that are way bigger, stronger and tougher than he was. It came to him as naturally as breathing, a soothing flame in the back of his mind.
He has a muted conversation with the snake at the zoo. Piers, despite being stupid, rethinks his enthusiasm for seeing animals cavort when a bitter and angry stare from Harry manages to pierce the boy's stupidity shield and force him to take a step back.
Harry gets his Hogwarts letter and wonders who Dudley managed to bribe to pull this off. After finding one such letter stashed in an egg, he wonders whether or not this whole thing was a bit more serious than that.
Hagrid smashes through the door, almost getting skewered by a kitchen knife thrown by little Harry Potter. Harry doesn't say anything, but it's a disappointed silence. He did not have a sword handy, which mean that all he had was a few kitchen knives. Eh, he'd had worse odds. Now, if only he could remember where.
The blonde kid reminds him of someone. Someone he hates. Water is wet and the sun is bright, Harry hates someone that looks like Malfoy... but different. Still, he would treat the kid courteously and get out of there ASAP. He knew he'd kill the little idiot if he said too many things likely to be out of line. He asked the lady who was meant to be helping rather than catering to the smug fuck sitting next to him about whether they did custom clothing. He asked about weaponsmiths while he was at it.
The hat was weird. The night was weirder. What was that hat's problem with putting him anywhere but in Gryffindor? And why did it keep begging him not to kill them? It's not like he controlled whether someone needed to be killed or not. And why did all those suits of armour look so familiar to him?
His custom tailoring jobs arrived. He now wore a completely black everything; Black Hogwarts uniform, black shoes, black socks, black underwear, black everything. He asks Pomphrey about alternatives to glasses and gets rid of the plast framed bits of glass. He'd taken to wearing a completely black outfit none of the wizards had ever even seen before during weekends, the most distinguishing feature of the lot being the overly long black cloak he wore.
Again, people ignored his strange quirk of swinging two incredibly heavy training swords around in the morning. Occasionally, he'd go and ask one of the Centaur guards for a short spar or two. Firenze liked him. Bane gave him quite the workout. Both may have been sword masters, but still Harry outfought them every time. That came at the price of broken bones and mountains of bruises, but it was all fixed within a few hours.
He was uneasy about the magic he was learning there. He kept thinking that it was wrong somehow.
Hermione really thought that she was about to be brained when, all of a sudden the club connected with something with a smack. She gaped at the boy, dressed all in black, standing over her. Massive club stopped by his bare hands.
"What are you doing, little witch?" he whispers to her even as she sees that one of his legs now had a bone sticking out of it. "Run. I'll be right behind you." She knows it is a lie, but runs anyways.
Harry is in the infirmary. The troll's head was splattered all over the empty bathroom. Hermione couldn't help but shake her head at the boy. It felt so... normal, she guessed. As if this sort of thing happened all the time.
He refuses to show up for quidditch practice, saying that it interfered with his training. Wood reluctantly takes him off the team, stating that, practice attendance or not, Harry will be next year's starting seeker. Harry just stares blankly at him.
Ron is afraid of the boy. Albus is just uneasy with the flat stare he gets from the boy whenever he attempts to read the boy's mind. Snape is flat-out terrified at the sight of him.
Finally, Harry feels a slight, burning pain that he feels quite familiar with. So it is a brand after all, a small part of him, still cut off from the rest, recognised. Wonder where the evil intent is coming from. In the snows of January, Harry trains himself like a demon possessed.
He encounters a mirror one night. He sees a quiet night, an unblemished neck and tits. It confuses the hell out of him.
One day, several suits of armour and a broadsword go missing. Hagrid keeps crying about the Dragon that had left him. Harry doesn't say a word.
Hermione desperately tries to get close to Harry, trying to unravel the clues about why being near him felt so normal, so easy, so natural. About why, whenever he stares at Padma like a lost puppy, she gets this strange knot in her gut telling her to run from the room and scream.
Harry talks to both Padma and Parvati... and is bitterly disappointed with the results afterwards. Thing is, he still didn't understand why.
Harry, on one of his training trips into the forest, stumbles across the corpse of a unicorn. His scar starts to bleed. He snarls and leaves the area. This time, Bane doesn't even manage to lay a finger on the Black Demonspawn during their spar.
Hermione and Ron run to him, telling him about the stone, the dog and the thief. He nods and starts getting dressed halfway through their explanation, figuring that, since he knew that there was a target now and where it was, the rest could be expounded upon en route.
Neville tries to stop them. He looks at an armoured & armed Harry. A confused frown appears on his face even as he tells them about his intent to join them.
The Harp is still working, if only barely.
"Devil's Snare!" Neville shouts at the rest of the group. They draw their wands and cast light spells. Harry draws his sword and hacks away at anything that appears in front of him.
In the next chamber, Harry spots the crippled key sitting on the edge of the pack. He asks for a small boost to get it and jumps. His companions mass cast the leviosa at him. Once caught, the keys come to life and seem to become aware of the teens, swarming in a manner Harry recognises as blind rage. He chucks the key at Hermione and starts attacking the swarm, the small amount of upper body armour he'd managed to fit to his size taking most of the keys' maddened charge. A shout and he jumps off the nearest wall, switching direction without losing too much momentum. The door closing behind him leaves him feeling oddly frustrated, almost as if he wanted to go back in and fight. He just shook his head.
The next one was a giant chess set. Ron's sacrifice leaves Harry on the verge of laughter. That's it? He gets knocked out and gets to spend the rest of the time asleep? He notices Neville just quirk a smile and shake his head at the sight while Hermione rolls her eyes.
In the next room, a troll larger than the one from Halloween is shaking itself awake. Harry sprints at the troll, jumps to the side as a ponderous swing of a club comes his way, hamstrings the thing and severs its spine when it lands, howling. The now-trio move on, the two others looking at Harry in awe and confusion while the boy just focuses on whatever's coming next.
"It's a logic puzzle." Hermione's no-nonsense voice echoes through the room as she picks up one of the vials. "This is the one we're looking for." She frowns. "There's only enough for one dose..."
"Right." He sighed. "Hermione, take Neville and go. Ron may still be out of it, if so drag his sorry ass back with you. The first room should be clear of those monster weeds, so go in there and take refuge. Close the door behind you and guard it with your life. Understood?" Hermione just nodded, a determined glint appearing in her eye. "Then go!"
"Use the boy" A voice whispered, setting Harry's instincts into overdrive. He overpowered the bindings and jumped out of the way of the next silent casting with incredible speed & grace. "Fool! Get him!" Harry drew his sword just as a stunner connected with his torso armour, the clang of the spell pre-empting the massive electrical shock that forced Harry to his knees. He dodged the follow-up stunners and binding spells through instinct alone, desperately trying to locate that voice, a voice he'd heard once before. "Master! What do I do? And you call yourself a defence professor? Pathetic. Hit him with a reducto, that should get through his armor! Then stun the brat."
The voice. The chamber was a box of stone, too simple for hiding spaces and yet this mysterious voice had to come from somewhere. "Hey, old man." He wheezed out as he dodged yet another flurry of curses. "How about you tell me about where that special friend of yours is." His only answer was a barrage of explosive hexes & jinxes. "Alright, be that way."
Adjusting the sword's weight lying within his palm, Harry rolled under the next set of curses, jumped over a follow-up jinx before hitting another with the blade of his sword. The smoke and explosion from the blast befuddled Quirrel, causing the next jinx to go wide of its target. This was the moment Harry'd been looking for. He ran forward, hunching over as he maximised the thrust behind the sword. Quirrel saw him coming, panicked and shouted out protego, conjuring a strip of golden light in the child's path. His sword was slowed down by the barrier, enough so that the professor had time to leap to the side when Harry's blade powered through the space he'd just vacated. It was not enough. The direction of the blade shifted suddenly, once again putting Quirrel right in the path of the sword. An instinctual accio drew the blade off course, letting the professor hope that he'd finally have the opening to stun the little bastard once and for all. Harry sensed the course change, snarled and jumped, violently vectoring the blade back on course with its target.
The cut was a shallow one, but it left Quirrel squealing in agony as his eyebrows, nose, lips and chin fell to the ground, leaving nothing but bone behind. The Professor slumped to the floor while Harry relaxed unwittingly, his sword slumping slightly as he eyed the unscious man lying on the ground.
"Heh heh. Well done Harry Potter. Not many could defeat a full-grown wizard by such muggle means." the voice came from the defence professor, the blood from the wound he'd inflicted still gushing out onto the stone floor in a crimson torrent. Then, before Harry's very eyes, a new face started to form, the empty sacs sitting in their darkened orifices once more becoming eyes, the flayed muscles reforming themselves, the broken lower jaw and cheekbones morphing into a new shape. Finally, the skin reformed itself, the new layer being noticeably paler than that covering the rest of the body. "Why, very well done indeed!" the man, if it even was a man, laughed as the reformed dull brown eyes turned a reptilian red.
As the man before him started his tirade about once having been the darkest wizard of the age, Harry's scar started to bleed more fiercely. Then, the sword yanked itself out of his grip, the by-then familiar handle slipping at some unseen surprise attack.
"Hah! You should have paid more attention, brat! Just like your father... on the day that I killed him."
Harry's eyes widened. The thing in front of him had proclaimed itself to be lord Voldemort, the man who'd marked him. He hadn't believed the spirit until the sword had escaped his grip, drawing forth an old anger. This man made his scar bleed. He killed families for shits & giggles. He possesses arcane powers not even Hermione has ever heard of. "Prophet." He hissed out, the anger radiating off him at odds with the lanky frame of an eleven-year-old. "You killed my parents. You destroyed my life. And for what? You should be dead, but you're not." He gritted his teeth. "You fucking miracle." Voldemort's eyes widened at the inhuman howl that followed that statement. The brat was moving too fast for his wand to follow! How could he-
As Harry's padded gauntlets closed around the weak Prophet's neck, he felt another surge of power coursing through him. In his rage and anger, he pushed the power out of his body and straight into the defence professor's, the strange energies burning the husk housing the daemon's spirit. His smile widened as the former Professor's carcass was burned to ashes beneath his grip, not even registering the burning sensation coming from his hands or the fact that his body, perched above a roasting body as it throttled it, was boiling up inside the little armour he'd taken with him. Nothing mattered bar destroying this thing.
He passed out after the spirit fled his area, his entire body covered in severe burns. He still went with a smile on his face though.
The Headmaster's reassurances were ignored. Somehow, he knew what that thing was. He knew he hadn't killed it. He knew that, thanks to the mark on his forehead, this fight was far from over. For the first time in his life, Harry knew true despair. The part of him he never really touched upon was screaming in rage, angry and frustrated about something. Something like the feeling Harry got when finishing a chore and immediately being ordered to redo it, but infinitely worse at the same time. Neville and Hermione came to visit him regularly though, so he guessed it wasn't all that bad.
He sighed as he walked through the school's halls. He really did enjoy his time there, but, with the events of the previous week and the knowledge it brought, he could no loner deny that fate had caught up with him once more. Whatever happiness he'd found here would be lost in the battles to come. Somehow, he just knew.
A/N: Heehee.