I know that by now every one of my habitual readers is reading the fires to burn me alive, after all, I keep sort of trying to not begin any new story, and yet here we are.
For now, this chapter is simply a plot-bunny that I wanted to flush out of my head, and while I could do so on any Word file only to drop that into the bin, I thought, 'Why the hell not?' and decided of publishing it instead, if nothing else, to see if it's actually worthy to be pursued.
Revolution is already planned out chapter by chapter, The Age Of Man is already plotted out and the chapters are more or less ready up to number 40, while With the Eyes of God and Meddling Giant only have a complete plot to drag them forward.
I'm still undecided about my Marvel-related fics, some of those are planned out, some aren't, but I still need to figure out how to make the Main Character of those actually engaging to the reader.
As always, my Worm fics are really at the bottom of my priority list, given that I use them mostly to play with powers, and you all know how I decided to drop 'Stealing the Thunder' as an exercise in futility (especially now that Oda decided to drop his original, world-tilting ways and embrace the clichè of the foretold hero/reincarnation/prophecy-related bullshit).
So, bear with my plot bunnies if you please, given that they're mostly written only to free my fingers for worthier pursuits (at least for now).
This story begins at the night at the ministry at the end of the Order of the Phoenix, and I had the movie in mind when I wrote it. So, enjoy it!
You Know The Spell, Harry
Harry let go of the Cruciatus Curse after what amounted barely to an instant, and he kept his wand on his target when she turned towards him, almost pouting with eyes wide with disbelief and barely parted lips, which still quivered after the sharp scream that had left them.
And yet, there was no uncontrollable shaking of her limbs, no lingering fire in her brain. It wasn't what he wanted. Harry knew that Unforgivable, almost intimately at that: he remembered with stark clarity just how it had made his muscles size up when Voldemort had used it on him. He wanted Bellatrix to feel like that: she had taken Sirius from him, the promise of the only thing resembling a parental figure, why didn't she feel the gaping void that was his grief?
"You have to mean it." the voice was less than a whisper, but Harry could see how that suggestion made sense. Rage had brought him from the Veil chamber after Bellatrix, and the inferno that he felt burning inside of himself, the flames that just barely filled the Siruis-shaped absence that he felt, were what had allowed him to tentatively grasp on his revenge.
"She killed him... she deserves it." the serpentine whisper didn't nudge him, it didn't bring him any further on the path Harry had taken a few moments before, when his Cruciatus Curse had struck Bellatrix, dropping her on the ground more because of the spell's surprising nature -given just whose wand it had brought it into reality- than because of any true power on the Chosen One's part.
The hall of the Ministry of Magic was empty if not for Lestrange and himself, the dark tiles almost gleaming wetly as an answer to the torches while Harry's ragged breathing echoed hollowly in his own chest.
She had taken Sirius from him. Ultimately, that was all that there was to it: his wrath burned all the brighter when the weight of his own grief threatened him. A part of Harry, a small, whimpering part, only wanted to curl up and... and then what?
Waiting for the adults to solve this war hadn't worked. Giving up was out of the question, the option was discarded before Harry fully considered it: his contrary nature reared his head up once more, sheer spite smothering that option before it could take its first breath. And Sirius was still gone!
The whispers had slithered oddly into Harry's mind, curling around the fire of his rage without being consumed by it, crystallizing into something cold and sharp. Something unforgiving, just as he felt.
"You know the spell, Harry."
It was true, the Chosen-One knew the words well: how could he forget the lessons from Bary Crouch Jr.? How could he forget the night in the graveyard? Harry's rage flared once more, swallowing whole the brief flash of Cedric's fall.
Harry knew the words, and his rage filled him until he felt almost bloated, and yet he still had more to give: his magic matched his deepest emotion, and a faint breeze stirred in the otherwise still air of the Ministry, moving the short hair that kept his scar shadowed.
The holly and phoenix wand was still trailed on Bellatrix, and an emerald light coalesced at its tip: cold despite the burning fury that kept growing into Harry. She had taken Sirius away, and he was alone once more. HE HATED HER.
"Avada Kedavra!" the words slipped from the wizard's lips with his full consent, and like a gunshot, they crackled through the empty Ministry.
A flash of green light blinded even its maker, and for an instant, after the spell left his wand, Harry's rage dwindled, almost like a flame guttering in the wind.
Then the Killing Curse struck: too fast for the disbelieving Bellatrix to dodge, too instantaneous for others to intervene.
His target fell back limply, with banal solemnity in the echoing scream that the spell had been. The green flash temporarily blinded the open eyes of the Chosen-One, and after it faded, it looked like some distant memory of it had been seared into his irises.
With the dead Lestrange at his feet, Harry's rage thrummed in triumph, the brief guttering of the flame in his heart roaring forward with renewed intensity despite the deep exhaustion that the young wizard settling in his bones.
A dry chuckle made him whirl on himself, the familiarity with that voice triggering every instinct Harry had developed since his first year at Hogwarts. Half-turned towards the origin of the sound, he was slammed on the dark tiles while the impact caused him to lose his wand.
"Well done, Harry!" Voldemort's voice was as close as cheery as it could go, and the undisguised joy in it made a shiver run down the Chosen One's spine, "I didn't think you'd be strong enough to actually do it, shall I give 10 points to Gryffindor?"
Potter's eyes ran from the hauntingly familiar shape of the Dark Lord to his last success: Bellatrix remained sprawled on the dark tiles of the Ministry of Magic, her expression still disbelieving and her breath never to return.
His emerald gaze settled on the dark shape of his enemy: he was cloaked in a black, loose robe that made the unnatural white of his skin jump out from the dark landscape of the Ministry's Hall. Then his mind caught up with his nemesis' words: "You let me kill her? Why?"
"Months of preparation, months of effort, and my Death Eaters allowed you to smash my prophecy..." the serpentine traits of Voldemort turned into a mockery of a smile: "My reasons are my own, but seeing Dumbledore's little pet kill in cold blood... oh, how will that impact my enemies?"
The Dark Lord moved in a circle around the utterly spent Harry, his red eyes gleaming hungrily as he stared at his enemy: "I'm almost tempted to let you live, to see the meaningless scramble to cover your guilt while attempting to retrieve your innocence, as the Ministry attempts to toss you in Azkaban..." what could have been a bark of genuine laughter felt like the twisting of a knife instead, "how amusing will it be to see Dumbledore spend himself to protect his now unworthy prophesized savior?"
Harry remained where he was, the emotions that had run through him that evening compounding the exhaustion that came from his feats of magic, but once more, maybe out of sheer spite for the enemy that had cost him so much, so often, the Gryffindor wizard brought his eyes to land on his holly wand, which was waiting for its master a few feet from him.
"Oh, no, I don't think so." with barely a twist of his wrist, a white bolt slipped from the Dark Lord's wand, vaporizing the length of holly and phoenix feather that gave to the youngest wizard something resembling a fighting chance.
The breath caught in the throat of the Gryffindor wizard, a pang of longing and grief managing to spike through the dull throbbing of Harry's utterly spent shape. There was a familiar glee in Voldemort's eyes then, something that paradoxically, made Harry let out a disbelieving peal of laughter: unlike the Killing Curse, unlike the Cruciatus, Potter had seen that kind of enjoyment since before his return to the Magical World. Dudley had been the same with any old toy that he had previously discarded, and that the freaky Harry had taken up to live some semblance of a childhood.
There was something utterly funny to the instinctive comparison between Dudley and Voldemort, and just as the hilarity washed over Harry, the Dark Lord lost his mocking smile, his habitual distaste for everything returning to the forefront of his mind.
"But the option of ending you know is simply too pragmatic for me to ignore, surely you understand?" what had once been Tom Riddle glanced at the fallen Death Eater, reminding Harry of his impending doom as he raised his length of yew.
But as it often happened, it wasn't yet Potter's time to die.
"It was unwise to come here tonight Tom." the calm voice of Albus Dumbledore heralded his arrival as he walked out from the green fire of a Floo.
The color of the Floo made Harry flinch, and for an instant, he waited for the guilt that he surely should feel by now. The arrival of Dumbledore brought it all back, his regular expectations and feelings, the kid that he had been until the death of his godfather, the boy that had refused to let Remus and Sirius kill Pettigrew. Just as the Gryffindor wizard had slipped into his murderous rage -and he could say that with a literal meaning now, couldn't he?- Harry expected that he should return to normal now. He expected, if nothing else, to feel relief at the arrival of the only one Voldemort ever feared.
Yet, Bellatrix remained still on the floor, his wand was still gone, and Sirius was dead. His rage was still there, a bright fire that he could feel licking under his ribcage, tongues of flame slipping into a heart that stubbornly kept beating.
No, even as Dumbledore started to work his magic to save Harry, the Chosen-One somehow knew it with certainty: there would be no coming back.
AN
I can clearly see the events going this way instead of how they went in canon (at least this scene is based on the movies, and I loved how the fic Cadmean Victory took this and repurposed Harry in the role of Voldemort for Neville).
Also, the twin cores-bullshit is something that I'll work through in Meddling Giant, I simply wanted to prune that particular part of the story in this fic to keep myself from playing too much with the lore, which tends to lead me astray.