Chapter Text
He remembered that, as a child, he had become particularly well-know in the neighbourhood for his violent streak. He stabbed his classmate’s skin with a compass and was forced to sit alone for the rest of the year, he broke Piers’ nose in three parts ―it required reconstructive surgery, said the gossip―, he tried to strangle Dudley with an old radio’s cord.
Never denied any of the accusations: they were right. In the most part at least. And, just as they say “tell a child he stutters and he’ll stutter for the rest of his life”. He even had a number of scraps of cloth stored in a box as trophies. All pristine white disturbed by the black of dried blood.
He used to sit in the shade of a tree in the local park. He would cut pieces of paper and use them to block out the sun. He played with shadows, big shadows, small shadows and those too old to be shadows. He chased squirrels, dragged snakes out of their secret places in the bushes.
Sometimes, he dreamed of a bloody knife hanging over a dead man’s head.
Harry Potter’s first memory was of isles whose rain was boiling water.
A memory, not a dream. Unlike what his relatives might suppose, he knew pretty well where the line between reality and fiction was ―thank you very much―. It was a memory because he could feel it; he could tell how far back it had been more or less. Since before his birth, he was sure. If that made any sense at all.
It didn’t. But nothing in his life made sense anyway. Remembering a past life in which he was an Emperor in a world of actual witches was far from his greatest folly.
Memories, what little tricky things. If he could, he would reach out a hand and take them, put them in his pockets to make sure he didn’t lose them. Because they always escaped him, all those details. He didn’t know his own name, though he wasn’t quite sure if he really wanted.
‘Harry’ was and always would be all right, he needed nothing more. It occurred to him, in the darkness of his cupboard, that it would be better just to forget the whole thing. He was no longer that person, if he had ever been.
The mind is deceitful. He remembered a bunch of tress covered by a gilded gallery, a gallery of lies. An there, the horrified face of someone like him ―the one who looked the most like him, but, what does that even mean?― and all he wanted to do was curl up in a foetal position and give up.
Somehow, he thought, the gallery was still here, but not as a gallery. Maybe it was a castle now, filled with those things that made him happy. Memories like the time he put a snake in Dudley’s bag, or the time he let wild bats loose in the teachers’ lounge.
His aunt used to tell him he was sick for rejoicing other people's suffering. That woman clearly needed a mirror, desperately.
There were only three rules in his life: smile, tell others what they want to hear and fear the truth. Easy, weren’t they? They worked well most of the time, specially when he spent long time periods out of the dark. Somehow, prolonged exposure to light and the real world always made his head feel foggy.
Every morning he woke up and talked about whatever Ron wanted to talk about, usually Quidditch of the twins’ latest prank ―he had to admit that the one they pulled with cheesecakes and a muggle roof fan was hilarious―. Then he got an early start on training with the team, one of the few things he really enjoyed. Flying was always his thing, even when he had little interest in Quidditch itself. Finally, he switched off the emotional side of his brain for 8 hours to get through the classes doing well enough to be on the honour roll at the year-end.
Start, finish and repeat.
At night, when all lights were out and his roommates were snoring in their beds, Harry would open his notebooks and write. Sometimes he would simply try to remember life before this, other times he would make up little stories or whatever. It was a moment for him, a small window in which he could be honest with himself.
Honesty, such a sad word.
He didn’t know how he began to invent spells. He guessed that at first he was merely attracted by the passion with which Professor Flitwick taught his classes. He started studying a bit of basic arithmancy to understand things like how wand movements are structured, or how you can tell how powerful a spell will be. He then modified one or two basic spells. He created a variant of Lumos that projected a series of small lights across the room, sort of like disco spheres; and a version of Diffinco that cut little circles instead of a straight line.
And so, suddenly, he knew he couldn’t stop.
He had always been interested in the Dark Arts ―something Harry Potter couldn’t be interested in, of course, so said interest had been a dirty secret―. His next spell was a curse. It was innocent in its own right, a tiny prank that only caused the equivalent damage of a bee sting and could be cast in silent. It had proven to be a good way to annoy Malfoy and his trolls. So far, they had made more than five trips to the infirmary and Madam Pomfrey was still unable to identify the curse. It was driving them crazy.
It was strange, the feeling that for the first time there was something he was passionate about. Something he actually wanted to do. Until then, things like preferences and dislikes had always seemed almost made up, things people talked about but no really felt.
Then, clutching his sheets tightly, he wondered what else he was missing. But that question brought him too close to places he didn’t want to go, places he only visited in miserable moments or in the midst of some weird plant intoxication. Those places, those moments. Another life altogether. Servants and witches and monsters. And himself, the biggest of all monsters.
He picked up his notebook, an almost masochistic impulse, like when you scratch yourself wanting to get the scab off a wound but too scared to do so, and began to write.
‘Phillip’
The irrational urge to cry overwhelmed him, ―his name, perhaps?―. It sounded like something his parents would have given him. Normal, a good enough alternative for “Harry”. Normal, just normal.
The pen scratched the paper as he struggled to write as much as he remembered, but falling short too many times and, in the end, not knowing what was true, what was a half true and what was a lie.
It didn’t matter anyway. Harry never liked the truth.
Tomorrow he would have forgotten it all. He would go back to smiling and waving like a trained seal. Pretend he hated the Dark Arts, loved Quidditch or thought the worst ones were in the right.
Because Harry Potter never liked the truth, which didn’t mean that lies were any better.
He was 12 years old when he raised an Inferius for the first time.
It was a dirty work, back then. Most necromancers had mentors to make sure they didn’t ruined it or end up cursed. Any witchcraft involving the dead is dangerous and, in retrospect, it was a bad decision to become a necromancer at such a young age. He had wanted to believe he was older and wiser than he really was, playing like a little kid.
He never regretted it, though. Life didn’t let dark wizards have regrets.
It wasn’t a human. It was a cat. A pet that a young Gryffindor had recently lost. The poor animal had a funeral, even, though they could never find out what happened to it ―don’t look inside Harry’s trunk―.
He cut the ligature of its paws with a knife ―like his throat, like his bones and muscles― and when they were limp and inert, he whispered for them to move. He kissed the bloody fur, without disgust. He revealed his most terrible secrets so that they would trust him. And finally, he got a reaction, a small movement of a foreleg. It had accepted his magic, whatever it was, and had allowed him to guide it as its owner had in another life.
The little creature staggered to its feet, and Harry laughed, full of glee and anxiety, because he knew he had just done something as terrible as illegal. It should’ve been obvious, but somehow it hadn’t sunk in until this moment.
He continued speaking affectionately, having long forgotten the book’s instructions. Shout, make it obey you by force. Shouting is ugly and no one learns from it, few knew that better than Harry.
He gave it more orders, thinking of his magic like the hand that arranges a pawn on the chessboard. Small and unlucky, it surely heard things no living being should’ve heard and Harry almost wanted to stop talking. Stop talking to the dead cat in the middle of the night like some kind of lunatic. Rebury the corpse and go back to the castle, pretend he never left his bed, pretend this never happened.
In the end, he was right. The little creature approached Harry, almost out of free will, and purred as he stroked its back. Its eyes were like those of a cute taxidermy specimen: glassy and toy-like. Its fur was pale blonde and the murmur of intelligence in its meow suggested a little Kneazle blood.
Harry thought the only thing missing was a crystal for a heart.
That same summer, he found an abandoned trailer home in one of the town’s worst parts.
He made himself an small airtight bubble with magic ―bless the runes― so that he could sleep without having to worry about insects, and that’s how he spent the first nights. At dusk on the third day, sitting in the cabin, he reflected that a few muggle-repellent spells would also be useful.
That night he ended up preparing liquid light in his school cauldron, putting it in bottles and placing them in strategic places. On a shelf in what was left of the kitchen, one in the driver’s cab. Then he wrote the repellent incantations on the red ritual ribbons and tied them around the bottlenecks.
Two opposites, two spells. A strange concept. Opposite magics didn’t usually cancel each other out, as common sense would say, but found a point of equilibrium, a moment in when the liquid glowed and no non-magical being would noticed, even when the light hurt their eyes. Harry knew it was a relatively new and ethically problematic field of study, which didn’t made it less interesting.
By the fourth day he had finished most of his homework and was deeply bored ―or rather, the still had his potions essay due and couldn’t find an excuse to procrastinate―, so he decided to clean up a bit.
He had some theories about how to get rid of the trace, but nothing for sure ―except that the simple attempt was probably illegal―. So he had to clean up by hand. It was never something he enjoyed, but the lack of furniture other than his own mattress made the process easy for the most part. Brew up a cleaning potion, smear it on an old rag, an wipe it over every surface within his vision field. It worked wonders, wiping away even the darkest graffiti, and Harry ended the day with a big smile on his face.
Perhaps it was early ―and it was, of course― but it occurred to him that he could use this place for the holidays instead of staying with the Dursleys, until he came of age. Who could say he wasn’t with his relatives anyway? As far as he knew, no one watched him during summer, and even if they did, they could have to enter the house to notice his absence, given his habit of locking himself in his bedroom.
Decided, then. He would go out, get a home construction kit ―to make invisible expansions, set up a little floo red― in Diagon Alley, and make this place his summer project.
Blessed be his invisibility cloak.
He returned from the Alley with his heart in his throat. Apparently the wizards had a busy summer. A convict on the run from Azkaban, a convict who might want Harry’s head on a stick. Typical, surely that happened every day.
He had barely managed to escape with his kit after learning of the situation. Mr. Weasly had tried to stop him and asked things like what he was doing here, why he wasn’t at his relatives' house. Harry liked Mr. Weasley, but that line of thinking had been enough to make him to want to punch the man in his nose. The only person with the authority to decide where he spent the summer was himself. Fuck Dumbledore.
His grumpiness lasted until he opened his kit and began to look at the extensions-making tools. They were 4 chisels enchanted to automatically carve the relevant runic matrices. All he had to do was bring them close to the place he wanted to enlarge. Rather handy.
He immediately set to work. He dragged an old wooden trap door he had stolen from a dumpster and placed it against the back wall of the trailer. Holding it up, he began to draw some basic runes around it. Different wizard had different ways of sealing the runes once they were finished, Harry’s was to hum a little song as he went over the runes with his index finger, filling them with his magic. When he finished, the trapdoor was attached to the wall, its hinges fixed and properly welded.
Then he took one of the special chisels and, guided by the maker’s magic, began to carve the second matrix.
This one was much more complex than the first. Harry didn’t even understand half of what his hands were writing ―something about growth, and light or dark―. In the end, the matrix spanned almost the entire wall and he was overcome by the crushing realisation that he would have to master this, if he wanted to be a rune master one day.
As if would stop him. His sad face stretched into a toothy grin and, seized by a sudden, irrational flash of motivation, he slapped the centre of the trapdoor with his open palm.
At that moment, a glow began under his hand and spread throughout the matrix. With a indescribable sound, the light flickered and then went out, sealed.
Simple as that. Excitedly, Harry opened the trapdoor and, instead of a wall, the found a whitish wooden tunnel that grew larger and larger to create another room. It wasn’t huge, but it was big enough to be his living room, and he could even fit a window on the highest wall.
Quickly he stepped inside, smiling as he heard the sound of his shoes hitting the wooden floor. There was a kind of childlike fascination in all this, something that had been taken away from him a long time ago, which didn’t from him feeling strongly when the time came.
Harry loved magic.
(Didn’t care if his memories said otherwise).
He reached up and stretched out his senses, ―one of the most useful things almost no student bothered to learn―. He felt his own magic bounce off the walls, tracing them like a wave, like smoke. And he shuddered everywhere that wasn’t his body. It was as if he was straining, squinting his eyes in an attempt to understand.
Then, when he finally got a clear enough picture, he sat down in the room’s centre and took out his notebook to start taking notes.
However, a thought had embedded itself in the back of his brain. How had he known that hitting the matrix would activate it?
Harry had been especially admired and revered for most of his life. Mostly for things he wasn’t even responsible for, and even by that definition, “making good life decisions” was never one of those things.
So, when he saw a huge black dog that might as well be a grim approaching from an adjacent dumpster, he had no better idea that to let it in. Being good to animals wasn’t exactly a sin, after all ―and he wasn’t even planning to kill it and turn it into an inferius―.
All went well at first. The dog turned out to be nothing less than a gentle giant, trying to lick Harry’s face and wagging his tail when he heard him talk. Didn’t complain when Harry tried to a bathe him, though he certainly didn’t like Harry’s attempt to put a collar on him. He didn’t threaten to bite him, however, and calmed down suspiciously fast when Harry told him to.
And then, of course, there was the fact that this “puppy” emitted as much magical force as a full-grown wizard.
Harry massaged his temples, wondering if he could use this as an argument in a discussion with Dumbledore about making the magical sensitivity development a compulsory subject. A discussion he would never have, however. Only fallen lords can be questioned.
The dog turned out to be Sirius Black.
He promptly collapsed when Harry threatened him with a good kitchen knife ―apparently he didn’t even have a wand on him― and reverted to his human form only to start spouting a whole story of betrayal, illegal imprisonment and rats.
Harry knew that taking the word of a stranger who posed as a dog to get close to him was among the stupidest things he had ever done. But somehow, seeing this man defeated and half-mad, he felt he could do something good for him. Help him in some way. And he found himself inclined to trust him.
On the other hand, there was the small and insignificant detail that Ron’s rat also had a wizard’s magic, of course.
Sirius agreed to stay with him ―or rather, Harry agreed to harbour an escaped convict― for the rest of the summer. At the same time, he pledged to help the man with his revenge in any way he could.
At first, he had considered contacting a lawyer, but then gave up. If there was one thing he had learned from his memories, it was that being against the government was a high-risk sport. At least, he knew what his other-life self did to those who questioned him.
Sirius wasn’t particularly interested in clearing his name either. In fact, it seemed that the only things he cared about were Harry and his revenge. It made Harry wonder, with clenched fists, what exactly his plan had been before. At this point, he wouldn’t be surprised if the man replied that he had no plan or that his plan was simply kill Pettigrew and then kill himself. He seemed like that kind of idiot.
At least he didn’t have to convince him that personal hygiene wasn’t a “social convention”, which made him better than most of the people he normally dealt with.
Sirius knew more than he let on.
That, Harry discovered, was actually true of most of pureblood families’ heirs. Trying to talk to Nott was more a social engineering exercise than a conversation, and Abott became a pain in the moment she began to suspect that someone was after her family’s secrets ―which, at least in Harry’s case, was true enough, why else would he talk to her?―.
The difference was, of course, that Sirius was willing to share those secrets, for the most part.
“See that constellation?” the man pointed to the sky, tracing the shape of Orion with his finger “The Hunter. My mother used to perform rituals only on nights when its stars were brightest.”
Harry followed him out of the trailer, pointing his gaze at the constellation with all the fascination with which he normally read his astronomy books. Certainly, one of his favourite classes.
He never liked the moon, though. Especially the crescent moon. Seeing it was like trying to scrape rocks with his fingernails.
“Was it just a tradition?” asked Harry after a long silence. “Or did it have some magical meaning?”
“I’m not going to lie, Harry. Most of the things that out of my mother’s mouth varied from lies to nonsense. But I’ve always believed this to be true.” Sirius gestured for Harry to follow him and together they walked down the street, until they stopped seeing houses and began to spot road.
They would go to a place without light, was their silent agreement. The stars couldn’t be seen well with the city lights blaring. Harry would have preferred to go to the observatory in Knockturn Alley, whose dome was magically configured to ignore the satellite lights and only show the stars, but beggar can’t be choosers, especially when accompanied by supposed mass murderers.
They swerved until the road’s lights were no more than distant glimmers, and there, in the absolute darkness, Harry felt the sudden urge to laugh, but he swallowed it down. That strange laugh that was so like him, the laugh of a child playing with a wooden sword while everything around it’s falling apart.
But no, a thirteen-year-old following a near-strange into the woods was no laughing matter. He wasn’t exactly scared either, which would have been a more normal, socially acceptable reaction.
They ended up in a glade, where they could clearly see all the little star dots, the moon with its light halo and the clouds, grey as sad lambs. They sat cross-legged on the ground and played at pulling up bits of grass.
There, Sirius talked to him about things no other adult would have dared to talk.
“Sometimes, you pick a constellation and promise it you’ll only do dark magic when its stars allow you.” He blinked, then laughed, a little oddly sharp around the edges. “It was a sort of initiation ritual for us. We usually chose the constellation we were named after. Sometimes we do it with someone in mind.” So his face lost the smile. “Your father’s was Canis Mayoris.”
Harry leaned forward and tightened his fingers around the strands of grass. It was almost surprising. Surprising if he hadn’t expected it. No one is born a dark wizard, not really, but there are inclinations.
“Anyway, it was something more for the ritualists. The amplification of your magic is good, but the limitation is an absolute pain in the ass. Your dad and me just did it because we were forced to use only light magic most of the time anyway. The war, you know? One slip and you were branded a traitor. You couldn’t even cast a Fiendfyre.”
“But that’s stupid,” said Harry. Dark magic far surpassed any neutral magic in power and was far easier to learn than light magic. Not using it seemed obtuse, almost childish.
Sirius nodded, as if he could hear Harry’s half-formed thoughts.
“They were better than Voldemort, you know, Dumbledore and the Order. In a lot of ways, they still are…”
Harry knew Sirius wanted to add more but decided to bite his tongue.
For most people, the simple concept of dark magic was a formless evil, a thing barely present and only to be glimpsed out of the corner of their eye, a rumor. This one and that one were dark wizards. A Slytherin walked into his common room with a dubious book in his trunk, a Ravenclaw girl cast a curse that no one her age should know.
No one said that Harry Potter sat on his dormitory floor at night and resurrected rats, because Harry Potter was a smiling boy everyone loved and who wore a golden scarf in winter, an invariable sigh of purity. People forgot that gold could well be, and almost always was, just a layer of cheap paint. But nobody likes to be wrong.
Yet they still felt the coldness in his palms every time they shook hands with him. The almost blue tone on his neck’s skin. “Lack of blood, I’m a little bit sick,” he used to say. Then there was his slightly crooked walk. The calmness with which he reacted when Snape instructed them to kill a little animal in potions class. And he always had some excuse for all of the above, as if he knew people would be suspicious.
No one called him a dark wizard, though. Dark wizards were supposed to be either ugly and old weirdos or rich spoiled boys with pale skin and a face like they were smelling dung. A dark wizard wasn’t supposed to help the new students find their classes or win them the Quidditch Cup year after year.
That was, if anything, the worst of a long series of collective mistakes.