Chapter 1
It was interesting, Harry thought, how everything looked better covered in blood.
Red was never his favorite color. In fact, Harry hated it for a great deal of his life. Dudley's favorite color was red, which meant nearly all of Harry's cast-offs were washed out, weak imitation of the real thing.
It wasn't like the shirts were much better. They were too pink. Their red was a disingenuous mockery of what true red was like. There was something fake about it, like that red thought it fooled everybody. Look at me, it said. I'm the best that red can be.
But Harry knew true red. He had known it as intimately as he thought he would have his mother. The way the color shifted and glistened in the light, the hue shifting with every shadow. It was teasing, mysterious. It beckoned Harry to learn all its secrets, learn how it hardened under certain conditions. The way red could swell to seemingly impossible heights before its sheer volume of the life-giving (life-*taking-*) drop forced the whole mess outward, brutally carving darkdarkdark over his skin.
Harry thought the whole pain thing was overrated. He was sure he knew every pain there was. The sharp agony of a broken bone. The dull ache of starvation. The smell of his own skin burning.
Yes, he decided. He could go without it. But the blood- the blood- it was magnificent.
It made a rather ironic, to him and him only, bookend to his life. Fascinated with it in the beginning, following it to the end. It was really very obvious that he would discover the books in the Black library, that summer at Grimmauld Place. A library tucked neatly away in the wards, complicated blood magic hiding it from prying eyes. For no ordinary person could find this library. This library was a treasure trove of blood magic literature, available only to the head of the house of Black.
The Triwizard Tournament had emancipated him, and Sirius' death had appointed him, in Magic's eyes, the new head of house. Entire branches of family history instantly bloomed before his eyes, the information fitting into his mind like they had always belonged there. The Potter House. The Peverell House. The intermarriages that brought creature blood into the family. The duty that all Peverell men must perform. Protectthehallowsprotectthehallowsprotectthehallows.
Grimoires of forbidden family magics. Transmutational Alchemy. Homunculi. Necromancy. Horrible, tragically forgotten magics, the likes of which the world had not seen since the Middle Ages.
The wizarding world was not prepared for the well-spoken politician the Boy Who Lived had become. After Voldemort's defeat, the boy disappeared, leaving the world to wonder what became of him. Ten years later, the new and improved Harry Potter returned from somewhere.
Somewhere nobody could find. Harry appeared as suddenly he had vanished, in the Wizengamont chambers. He came to claim his Potter, Peverell, and Black house seats. Two for Potter, two for Black, and four for Peverell, as an Ancient and Noble House. He smooth-talked his way through passing many creature-positive bills forward. A new bill approving government funding for a Wolfsbane distribution network that provided the potion for less than half the cost of the potion went for normally.
No one questioned the sudden good fortune werewolves had, how the potion could be sold for less than the sum of its cost in ingredients. If anyone had looked, they might have noticed that the Wolfsbane distributed through this network gradually began to change colors. The potion kept darkening by shades, so gradually that no one noticed it had shifted from deep azure to dark navy color.
Around the same time, the Dark also passed a bill that standardized healthcare for goblins. Goblins, who notoriously loathed the intervention of humans into their culture. As the Ministry began sending good-intentioned but ultimately xenophobic wizards to the heart of the Goblin Nation, Harry Potter was busy rubbing elbows with the greasiest of politicians. Ten years had transformed Harry into a political genius, and the world could only watch as the Boy Who Lived became the Boy Who Conquered.
Before another ten years had passed, Harry was the Minister of Magic and one of the core founders of the International Wizarding Allegiance, or IWA. In the face of growing tensions between the more Western cultures that favored more rigid, structural view of magic and the freer, more spiritual cultures in the East. Tensions between countries rose to a breaking point, eventually leading to all-out war.
At the head of the British Magical Forces? Harry Potter, standing tall and strong with his army of werewolves. Strengthened by potions kept secret in the Potter family for generations, the werewolves turned into something else. The few that returned home after serving their duty to the BMF whispered of monsters that tore through flesh like tissue paper. Awful, tortured monstrosities that seemed to come from the depths of Hell. Almost completely magic-resistant and seemingly immune from pain, unseeing and unfeeling as blood rent the air in glorious arcs.
Utterly unstoppable- to no one except Harry Potter.