A/N: It's turkey day, and today I am thankful for Harrymort. So, how about an update for you? This chapter is the shortest one yet, but I wrote the whole thing in about an hour and a half and it was gonna be longer but I've gotta get ready for thanksgiving dinner.
Enjoy!
Harry quickly discovered that there were much more interesting things in his mind than the Dursley's house. A bit of exploring revealed not only that there were parts of his favorite playground down the street, but also that he had the control to create whatever he wanted here, whether that be a physical structure – or an imaginary person. He wondered if perhaps the man he'd seen back in limbo had been his imagination, too – but he doubted it. His imaginary people for the most part were exact replicas of people he'd met before, only with different personalities.
At first, he'd amused himself by making fake-Dudley dance around in a bright pink leotard and tu-tu. Eventually, that got boring, and with enough effort he tried to mentally construct a working rollercoaster. It was very difficult but he'd finished, and had also made the rest of a rather modest amusement park for himself.
All he had to go by were stories that the other children had told him about theme rides, but he thought it looked pretty good. At that moment, he was waiting in line.
"I can understand why you'd make the rides," A voice behind him noted, "But the desire for this long line is beyond my comprehension."
Harry turned around, and saw that the red eyed man was in line behind him, raising an eyebrow at his imaginary creation.
"I want it to be realistic," Harry explained, taking a few steps forward as the line moved, "I've never been to a place like this for real. I want it to be as close to true as possible."
The man looked very interested in this, and nodded slowly. He reached out his hands and covered Harry's eyes, and in the darkness it created, Harry began to hear things. When the hands were removed, Harry looked at everything in wonder. It was so different than he'd thought! There was color everywhere, and people laughing, and a babe crying in the distance. There was a cart selling turkey legs and hot dogs and other foods Harry hadn't even heard of, and a cone of ice cream was dripping into a man's hair as his young daughter rode on his shoulders – pointing excitedly at the coaster and yelling out to her sibling that must have been riding it.
Fun music was blaring hypnotically through loud speakers, the beat kept steady by the rhythmic clapping of children's shoes hitting the pavement hard while they ran this way and that. A group of teenagers, clad only in swim-gear and towels were yapping in line behind him, complaining about the shining sun. One of the girls popped her gum, and the boy behind her pulled the tie on her bikini, making her shriek and pull her towel up higher. There was a person dressed head-to-toe like a popular cartoon character that Dudley liked to watch on television, and an excited little boy was taking a picture with him while his older brother looked on, rolling his eyes at the childish display, and their mother gave him a stern look, pushing her sunglasses up and grinning encouragingly to her younger son.
It was perfect.
"Thank You!" Harry exclaimed, delightedly. He hugged the red-eyed man tightly around the waist and looked back at everything, smiling so hard his cheeks hurt. "This place is wonderful!"
The red-eyed man nodded. "I've only ever been to an amusement park once, and I was well older than you are. You'll have to tell me what it's like from a child's eyes."
"It's perfect and colorful and – Oh! I'm so close to the front of the line now!"
Harry remained at the theme park for days. By the time he was done with it, he'd ridden every single ride enough times to recreate them without the red-eyed man if he ever needed to. The man didn't stay with him the whole time, he went back and forth, and when Harry asked where he went off to, he said that he sometimes went to go see what was going on in the other Harry's mental space.
"You can see both?" Harry had asked, very curious about that.
"Of course. I can do anything," The man answered, "But truly I'm just watching it from your living room television. I don't want any trace of me to be in that other Harry's head just yet. Dumbledore needs to be emotionally invested in you before he realizes I'm here or he'll do something drastic."
Harry nodded, and closed his eyes, concentrating hard. Slowly – the theme park disappeared, and he was back at Privet Drive.
"How long has it been since Evan left?" He asked the man, flopping out on the couch and ignoring the television for now – although he still couldn't work out how to shut it off.
"Nearly two weeks." The man answered, "Do you miss him?"
"Not too much. I thought it would be really lonely without him, but you're here, so it's okay."
"I thought you were frightened of me."
Harry yawned, curling up more tightly on the couch and wandlessly covering himself with a blanket – not noticing the impressed expression on the man's face when he did. "Of course I am." He answered, closing his eyes to sleep, "But, behind that murderous vibe, you're just as lost and alone as me…" He murmured, drifting off to sleep.
The man watched him for a while. Subconsciously, he listened to Harry's breathing - deep and true in that way that only children slept, with absolute detachment from any obligation they had in the waking world.
XxBxExLxOxVxExDxX
"How do you plan on getting back to him without the new Harry seeing you?" Lucius asked, his eyes half-heartedly gazing at the muggle woman slowly bleeding to death on the floor while Evan brushed her hair.
"Plant the watch onto your son and I'll have him slip it to him before the sorting." The Rosier answered, taking his wand and running it down the woman's face, eyes gleaming delightedly when her skin burned and contorted on contact. She didn't even have the will to scream anymore, and instead a disturbed choking sound erupted from her throat.
Lucius frowned. "She's starting to sound like a dying canary."
"Don't flatter filth like her by comparing her to something as lovely as a bird, Luc." Evan replied, casting a final killing curse and then looking up at his lover with a sadistic grin. "Let's bring in the next one, shall we?"
Lucius groaned and turned towards the ever-growing pile of bodies that was forming in the corner of the previously magnificent Rosier tea-parlor; now turned torture-chamber.
"We've been through six of them already and none of them will talk. They've clearly been obliviated already."
Evan shook his head. His face showed calculated and malicious determination. "They remember him, or they wouldn't be so afraid to talk – we just need them to understand that he's not the only person worth being frightened of."
And so Lucius rose and brought in a man. He was an elderly looking muggle, definitely at least sixty if not older. His eyes were wide and full of terror, and Lucius pitied him, if only a little. He didn't take any great delight in Muggles, but Evan's hatred for them was on a level that the poor people never seemed to understand well enough to get out of dodge.
"Are you Alan Carter?" Evan asked, waving for the man to take a seat. The man politely declined, choosing instead to stand, and Lucius decided he was already a bit smarter than the rest.
"You gonna kill me like you just killed Mary?" He asked, looking over at the pile of corpses.
"Not if you're a good boy and tell us what we need to know," Evan answered, smiling sweetly, though it couldn't calm the chaos in his eyes.
Lucius wondered how it was that Evan could get away with telling a sixty-something year old man to be a 'good boy' and not make it look absolutely ridiculous, but he knew that Evan was the kind of person who had insanity woven through his mind so thoroughly and precisely that he could make the most immoral, illogical, or impossible things look not only as if they were the right thing to do – but as if they could be done effortlessly.
The man, Alan, sighed. "This is about that Riddle boy. Isn't it?" He asked, looking as if he dreaded the answer.
Evan shot Lucius a quick look that said 'I told you so' and then nodded eagerly to Alan.
"Yes, Alan. I'm sure you've noticed that you and the other people who were brought here today have something in common?"
Alan's nod was as grim as Evan's was eager.
"We all finally made it out of that damn orphanage before that murderous lunatic came back to-"
"You will not speak of him that way!" Evan bellowed, his wand slashing furiously through the air. Alan's head jerked viciously to the side and his cheek began welting up as if slapped hard with a steel paddle. Lucius rolled his eyes.
"Perhaps this isn't the time to be the best little-death-eater-that-could, Evan. I'm sure that dear Alan did not mean to offend."
Evan's eyes softened as much as was possible for him, and he smiled, caressing Alan's face with his wand. The wound healed, and he leaned in, placing a soft kiss on the formerly-abused cheek. "There, there." He soothed, backing up only enough to look Alan deeply in the eyes. "It doesn't have to be all bad. Now, does it, Alan?"
Alan, only more afraid of them now that Evan was being disturbingly sweet, shook his head with compliance.
"My beloved companion here, Lucius, is going to take a look into your mind," Evan explained, "You will not attempt to disallow this, and you will not struggle – or I will kill you very, very slowly. Do you understand?"
Alan nodded, and Evan stepped back, watching calmly as Lucius perused the old man's memories. It took nearly twenty minutes, and Evan thought to himself that this man must have lived a very long and full life.
"Nothing." Lucius said, straightening up to look at Evan properly. "Perhaps we should consider that there was nothing at the orphanage that our lord valued enough to place his soul into."
Evan frowned angrily, casting an absentminded killing curse at Alan, who slumped to the ground, dead. "But that puts us back at square one!" He complained. "All we know about for sure then is that there's the locket Reg had his elf destroy, and Harry! How did our lord expect us to revive him if he never gave us any of his soul shards personally?"
This would later be another moment in Lucius' life that he would look back to and marvel at his own stupidity. Even then, Evan hadn't entirely explained to him how Horcruxes worked; so he hadn't even thought to consider the diary. Nor had he read any of those handy-dandy dark arts books that Voldemort had left him, explaining everything that needed to be done.
"Perhaps there's a way to bring him back using the boy. In your time in his mind have you run into our lord personally?" Lucius asked.
"No, he won't speak to me." Evan answered, sounding truly saddened. "He has not yet deemed me worthy of his conversation… but I don't know what else to do! I'm influencing his greatest enemy into being his greatest ally, I'm trying my best to track down his Horcruxes and bring him back before Dumbledore finds out about them, and on top of all that – I already died once for the cause! What more can I do?" Evan asked pleadingly, looking to the sky as if begging for divine intervention.
"Calm down, Evan." Lucius murmured, rolling his eyes. "No need to question your whole life over one soul shard."
"I'm not questioning anything. I wouldn't dare." He insisted, "I just don't understand, that's all. My family has always been in the dark lord's favor! Especially Bella and me! What have I done to earn his distrust?"
Lucius was quite used to Evan going into his 'I'm not the dark lord's favorite anymore' tantrums at this point, so he wasn't going to let it get to him. Aside from the fact that he highly suspected Evan and Voldemort's relationship to have gone a bit farther beyond servant and master at some points, he had no issue with Evan's unwavering loyalty. A new thought had recently occurred to him, though.
"Maybe he doesn't know you," Lucius suggested, and it sounded truer once he spoke it. "Maybe when you make a horcrux by accident, it works a little differently than a deliberate one, and you lose a bit of yourself. Could that be it?"
Evan frowned thoughtfully, and then his eyes widened. "Luc, you're a genius!" He exclaimed, "When you're making a horcrux, you're supposed to concentrate on your first memories, as far back as you can think! That must be so that you transfer over your life from that point onward. But our lord wouldn't have been thinking to do that! He'd just have been thinking-"
"About whatever made him decide to kill Harry Potter." Lucius finished, grimacing slightly, "But if all that the soul shard remembers is wanting to kill Harry, why would it be helping him?"
At that, Evan was stumped.
A/N: Sorry again for the brevity of this chapter, but I hope you liked it.
Everything is still un-beta'd because I still don't have one, so PLEASE send me a private message if you're willing to lend a helping … eye.
Thanks So much for reading! I'd love to read your reviews if you're up for it!
Love you guys, and Happy Thanksgiving to all the US people!