Cedric was dead. Harry knew that, but he kept on looking over to try and spot him moving. The killing curse was permanent. He knew that better than anyone.

He barely flinched as Wormtail took his blood. He stared in horror as Voldemort rose again. He tried to stand tall as he was challenged to a duel.

"You know how to duel, don't you?" he hissed.

"Yes," Harry said begrudgingly. He didn't know if he really knew enough to duel a dark wizard with decades of experience more than him, but he supposed that he remembered enough.

"We will duel," Voldemort said softly, "and I will win. I will not kill you though. You will join me."

Harry struggled to see where Voldemort was getting this from. He had never expressed the slightest interest in joining a murderous cult.

"You killed my parents and my grandparents, you MONSTER! I will never join you."

"Yes, you will, Harry. I am your grandfather."

At first, Harry laughed. He couldn't help it.

"You're…my…grandfather?" he managed to choke out after a few minutes of trying to regain his senses.

"Yes, Harry," Voldemort said in what Harry took to be a very poor approximation of what he thought Dumbledore's grandfatherly voice sounded like. "I offered your mother the same choice, and I killed her when she refused. She betrayed me three times, and then I couldn't bear to have my daughter defy me like that."

"You killed her. You killed your own daughter."

Harry felt ill. He had never had parents so wasn't sure entirely how it was supposed to go, but from what he had observed from the Weasleys, he was almost certain that filicide was not part of it.

"I was right," Voldemort proclaimed proudly. "It is better to have no daughters at all than have a disappointment for one."

"But Aunt Petunia…"

"Petunia is no daughter of mine. I don't accept failures like her."

Harry started to think that he understood where the animosity between the two sisters he had been able to sense came from, even though his mother was dead and he had never known her, and his aunt seldom talked about her.

When Dumbledore saw him in his office at the end of term, there was something impenetrable about his expression. After Harry had explained what had happened, the last thing he did before he was sent off to the hospital wing with Sirius was give him a diary. He threw it in his trunk. He didn't want anything more to do with diaries.

Harry arrived back at Privet Drive that summer in a daze. Voldemort was back, and Cedric was dead. Voldemort was his grandfather. The moment he was alone with his aunt, he turned to her.

"Did you know?" he asked.

"Did I know what?" she replied snappily.

"Him," he said, hoping that she would understand what he was saying so that he wouldn't have to explain it or think about it too much.

"Yes," she spat. "Of course I knew.

"Magic killed my parents. Magic ruined my childhood."

"But…"

"Tom Evans died in 1970 when he realised he couldn't hold himself back anymore. He started sneaking out at night and murdering people like me after I didn't get into Hogwarts."

"I THOUGHT SHE WAS A MUGGLEBORN!" Harry yelled.

"They don't like to think about where their golden boy came from. Grandchild of that man. It would have been unassailable. So, they told you something better. About suburban normal people who just so happened to have a magical daughter. Pure chance. It wasn't chance though, was it? I was the anomaly. I was the unexpected surprise when I couldn't make flowers bloom. That letter from Dumbledore told us what they would tell you. They probably told you that Tom Evans was an accountant, didn't they?"

"Yes," Harry said.

"He was a serial killer. There were unexplained murders in our area even before he revealed himself. He was just biding his time."

Without saying a word, Harry ran upstairs and sat down on his bed. He was too confused to even slam the door of his room behind him. The idea of braving Uncle Vernon's censure was exhausting.

He found himself reaching into his trunk and pulling out the diary that Dumbledore had given him in his office. It was clearly quite old and not quite as well maintained as the . . . other one had been. This was a diary that had clearly been bought in the muggle world, and while it was fairly standard on the outside it had clearly been augmented by magic. He very much doubted that they sold fifteen-year diaries, and this one just so happened to be a 1970-1974 one that had pages all the way up to the end of 1984. Although the first half of the book was filled with the neat handwriting of a young Lily Evans, it stopped three years before the end. Harry couldn't help but sob at the implication. She had never finished it. She had expected to live long enough to fill up years more. Speeding through the book, the first half was full of stories of a young optimistic witch just starting out in the world.

I have made a new friend and he is going to Hogwarts as well. He thought I didn't know what I was doing! We went to…

My letter came today. I wondered if it would after Petunia's. Dad says he'll take me to do school shopping tomorrow before work. I've never been to Diagon…

Mum took me to the station. Dad was too tired this morning after work. We got there early and sat and ate muffins and it was wonderful. It's going to be strange being…

James Potter is a prat, and his friend Sirius Black is no better. I hope…

I suppose Gryffindor is good enough. The downside to it is that I'm going to have to be in classes with…

Remus, Pandora and I have started studying together. Maybe not all Gryffindor boys are awful. He's actually quite nice. He keeps on giving me chocolate which is…

It's nice to be home for the summer. Petunia's acting strangely. I don't know…

I've found out why she's acting strangely. She has a BOYFRIEND! I am honestly at a loss for words. Vernon is creepy though. She's almost sixteen and can do what she wants, but I don't know what he's up to dating her. Should I get a boyfriend? Maybe…

My mother died today. I don't know how to feel. I had to help Petunia with the flood after her potion wore off. I don't know what the aurors were doing giving it to her. I've been crying…

I can't believe he called me that. After all our time as friends, it came out of the blue. That slimy Slytherin is…

Is James . . . nice? I'm sure I must be imagining it. He's…

And that's school over with. I can't believe that I won't be getting on The Express in September. Bizarre that…

Dad's…I can't believe I didn't notice before that he's…

Harry snapped the diary shut before he read any more. He didn't want to think about it anymore. Maybe if he managed to avoid thinking about it for long enough, it would no longer control him. He would no longer feel as though he was about to be sick almost every second of every day. He may have been the same person he always had been, Harry James Potter, son of Lily and James Potter, The Boy Who Lived, but he was different. He knew it, Ron and Hermione knew it. They had probably thought it was the result of him watching a person he knew die in the flesh, but it was deeper than that.

Grimmauld Place wasn't a home in the way that The Burrow was. To Harry, it felt more like he was visiting Sirius in prison, inexplicable shackles and all. Mrs Weasley had the Weasley children on task to try and make it feel like it wasn't, but there was only so much that could be done. For instance, the tapestry on the wall was colossal and terrifying. It bore numerous scorch marks where clearly someone had had a lot of fun blasting off their hated relatives' names.

"Does it update automatically?" he found himself asking Sirius.

"Yes. My mother was horrified when Tonks turned up. She was blasted off the day she was born."

"And it shows absolutely everyone?"

"Some parts all the way back to the Slytherin line. Black was a cadet line. The only thing that prevented us from becoming like the main line (the Gaunts) was the fact that we occasionally looked further afield for spouses and were as a result slightly less inbred."

Harry walked along the tapestry trying in vain to spot the name that he wanted so badly not to be there.

"Oh," Sirius said, realising. "You know."

"About what?" Harry said nonchalantly, trying to stop his panic from rising. People knowing he was maybe the grandson of Voldemort sounded like it could potentially get him into quite a bit of trouble.

"Lily told us all eventually," Sirius stated briskly. "I understand now why she didn't when we were all younger. Originally, she didn't know that he was doing it. Apparently, he was killing random muggles and the ministry couldn't trace him for it. She was eighteen when she found out. It was a few years after your grandmother died, and she put the pieces together. She moved in with Petunia and Vernon when they got married. Neither of them ever felt safe in that house again. That didn't last long though and they stopped talking almost completely."

"Were you angry when she told you?"

"The others were. I wasn't quite as much as the others. I understood having terrible relatives. Honestly, I was just upset that she kept it in all that time. She only had Petunia to talk to about it. That must have been incredibly isolating. I wish I could have been there for her. I understand having parents you don't agree with. Maybe it's not on the same level, but I think I was in more of a position to help her with that than anyone else."

Later, Sirius reluctantly showed him that part of the family tree. Sure enough, there it was. Tom Marvolo Riddle.

"My mother would have been delighted if she had found out that he was on our family tree. His name has never been widely known though. I only know about it because Lily told us."

"I only know about it because his spectre tried to kill me."

Sirius looked startled. "We'll get back to that."

Harry went back to the diary that night while Ron was asleep in the other bed. He found the relevant date and read the words written there. There was a stark difference between the neat penmanship of the earlier years and the shakier later ones.

Dad's…I can't believe I didn't notice before that he's…him. It all makes so much more sense now. Of course, he couldn't tell us about his job, he was off terrorising HELPLESS INNOCENT MUGGLES instead. Oh my god. He killed Mum. It was Petunia's seventeenth and he KILLED MUM. Death Eaters don't just ACCIDENTALLY kill their beloved leader's muggle wife. It was clearly premeditated. What is WRONG with him? WHY did he do this to us? I need to go. I can't stay here. He's downstairs right now making dinner pretending everything's alright, but I saw the robe, I saw the blood, I saw the LICENSES. Oh my god, he keeps TROPHIES. With mum gone OF COURSE he would be more open about it at home. Most of the time it is a perfectly safe space to get in a bit of muggle murder before popping off to Safeway to buy more chips.

"That anything important?" Ron asked, now awake.

"Yeah," Harry admitted, "but I don't want to talk about it right now."

"Later yeah? Whenever you're ready."

Then Ron rolled back over and was asleep again within minutes. Harry felt guilty about keeping a secret as big as this from Ron, but he couldn't tell him, not now. Not when Voldemort's snake had just attempted to kill his father.

Just after Christmas, Harry received a mysterious letter.

If you join me, I will spare them.

Yours &c,

Grandfather