Summary: Fourteen year old Harry Potter is sick of the wizarding world and everyone it. Well, almost. With the help of a sixteen year old Tom Riddle, Harry shows the world it's time to treat him with a little respect.

Rating: M. For a reason folks.

Characters: Harry Potter. Tom Riddle. Draco Malfoy.

Warnings: Violence. Vengeance. Dark Magic. Backstabbing. Mental and Emotional Abuse. Pureblood Politics. Possessed Diaries. Teenage Dark Lords. Manipulation.

Got Questions? Put them in your review! If I can I'll answer them.

If I told you what I was would you turn your back on me

And if I seem dangerous, would you be scared

I get the feeling just because, everything I touch isn't dark enough...

A monster! A monster! I've turned into a monster,

...and it keeps getting stronger

Harry had a lot to think about, a lot of things he didn't understand. Questions. Choices. So he stayed away, kept his distance for the remainder of the break. Even from Tom though he knew it hurt him.

Because Harry wasn't sure how to handle any of this new information let alone process it.

There was his strange connection with Tom, for one, revealed to him by Tabbris who was magically prevented from telling him important things by Dumbledore. Dumbledore who was keeping more from him than he previously imagined. There was the tournament and his goals for the future and Draco with his lessons and his strange over protectiveness.

Harry paced down in the chamber the only place he could think of to go for complete seclusion. Tom, seemingly realizing that Harry was having an emotional battle left him to it. Merlin knew how long that would last though. He rubbed at a phantom pain in his chest.

He felt like he needed a button to push pause on the world and time and everything going on until he knew his own opinion on the lot of it and could make the correct choices. He didn't know if he should continue to trust Tabbris, if she were telling the truth. He didn't think she would lie to him outright, or that her pain was acted, but he also hadn't thought she'd been best friends with Albus Dumbledore once upon a time either. ...of course just because they were friends once didn't mean anything now. A lot of people were friends once.

She did say she had a capacity for vindictiveness and cruelty.

The Gryffindor groaned and rest his forehead against a moist wall. He didn't know what to do.

What he'd originally wanted was to gain control over his life, teach Dumbledore to let him alone and maybe wreak havoc while he was at it. He wasn't sure if he should let himself become attached to any of these people outside his alliance. What did it matter of Tabbris was being tortured? What did it matter if she kept secrets? He might find out eventually, without her help.

Of course it could be very important...not that she could tell him anyway.

He groaned again, sliding down the wall to the floor. The coolness felt good at least.

Well, he thought, all people operate from two base motivations don't they? To fulfill desire or to escape pain. So, both Dumbledore and Tabbris had to be acting in the most effective ways there were capable of to either fulfill a desire or to relieve their suffering. Dumbledore desired control over Harry, for whatever reason. Tabbris desired- what? He didn't know. She did have pain to escape, it was obvious from her scars she had tried many times to find a way around her prison. Dumbledore, too it seemed, had pain to escape. He was trapped in an aging body that Tabbris could return to form, and in search of forgiveness. These were their known motivations that Harry could see.

He turned around and pressed his back to the wall, rubbing a hand over his forehead. His chest still ached.

Actually, when he let himself tone his suspicions and really look, he was sure that he and Tabbris suffered the same affliction. Eleutheromania: to fiercely and passionately desire freedom. Tabbris made her choices based on her personal opinions of freedom and justice and truth, from what Harry had seen of her and remembered from her conversations.

And anyway, didn't it go 'you should never trust someone who wants something from you'?

He knew Dumbledore wanted things from him, that was very obvious. Tabbris...she seemed interested in matters where it would gain Harry additional freedom from people like Dumbledore. The extra training, the lectures, the offers of lessons, the nightly escapades... It was all done to give Harry more freedom. To give Harry more personal power.

Why?

Why did this woman care so much about Harry? Care enough that Dumbledore felt the need to magically prevent her from revealing things to Harry, when Harry had never even met her before.

Wait. Didn't she supposedly have a form earlier in the year filled out by his guardians in order to speak with Harry privately? Did she go threaten the Dursely's or something?

I have here a filed and signed request form for a meeting from the boy's legal guardian.

Guardian. Singular.

"No ma'am. I hardly receive any letters at all. Usually just some now and again during the summer from my friends."

She smiled in his peripheral vision. "And your Godfather of course."

Harry nodded as much as he could with her hand holding his chin.

"Well yes he-"

She knew Sirius. Tabbris was either in contact with his Godfather or knew with enough certainty that he was was in contact with him and the Dumbledore knew about it for her to use that as an excuse to see Harry. And he knew Draco had delivered that letter to Lord Malfoy, but that didn't mean it was legitimate either.

Harry huffed. He needed to start paying more attention to the things people said offhand in conversation.

Harry sat up straight. What did Dumbledore say the other night? He was doing what was best for his world? And what was that riddle Tabbris had given the headmaster when he interrupted them in the forest that last time? Something about being given the answer to the worlds problems with payment of the soul, tears, blood and heart of someone in exchange?

"You see, Albus Dumbledore, in spite of my best efforts, refuses to see that pretending monsters away won't stop the bleeding when they bare their fangs and lash out their claws. This world has carefully hidden issues that have grown to big for their closets."

Too big for their closets.

Damn, now he knew why Tom kept a bloody diary. There was so much someone could say that doesn't make as much sense when they say it as it does later on when you have a chance to look back and examine it from afar.

"Impossible is not a rule, it is not an unbreakable law. Impossible is a challenge. It's a dare." Harry repeated aloud to himself, letting the words echo in a tangled kaleidoscope around the chamber.

Serephina wasn't her real first name, it was something that started with 'AL'. And she'd implied Albus wasn't Dumbledore's first name either. Though Dumbledore did have a large amount of names.

What was it she called Harry? Hadrianiel?

Merlin what did all of this mean? It was as if it were all laid out in front of him but he just couldn't piece it together. It was there, right there, he could almost see the bloody answer but he was missing information and he didn't know where to look to get the answers. Tom and Draco didn't know either and if he asked Moody the man might tell Tabbris he'd asked and Harry still wasn't sure what to do about her.

He stood, scowled, cursed, rubbed at his chest irritably and began the trek out of the chamber.

Half an hour later he dropped two, thick, rare books on to a table in the library. Alchemy and the Search for Immortality by Nickolas Flamel and Transfiguration from a Quantum Perspective by Stephen Hawking. Brown eyes looked up at him, startled, then flickered to the books on the table. Small hands picked them up, mouth dropping open in surprise.

"Harry! W-where on earth did you get these?"

Harry turned the chair around and sat on it backwards, arms laid across the back of it. "Don't worry about it. I need your help."

A thin brow raised. "...are you bribing me?" He smiled just a bit.

"I'm trying to."

White teeth bit a bottom lip. "I just- well what is it you need?"

"I need you to help me figure something out but you cannot tell anyone what I am going to tell you. I'll need an oath."

Unpolished fingers tapped on the table nervously, their owner both curious and suspicious. "That sounds sketchy Harry."

He leaned across the table and gathered two hands into his own.

"Please Hermione. I need your help."