In the cupboard again
1988
Well-groomed street of a small british town slept quietly under the ink sky, seeming to be the most far away from any strange or mysterious events. Window panes of almost identical lined up cottages gleamed in the light of street lamps, and wind gusts moved neatly trimmed bushes perfectly even lawn grass. The little boy slept in one of these house - the one that was number four, - in the dark and very tiny cupboard under the stair, where was only one dim bulb, weave of pipes near the wall, shelves filled with cleaning products, household chemicals and other junk.
He looked to be hardly older than eight; a skinny in a baggy well-worn clothes, he wrapped himself in a blanket of patches, curled up on the old mattress and the same not looking well pillow and sheet. The boy's black hair sticked out in unruly cowlicks, and a lighting-like scar could be seen under the strands falling on the forehead - red, inflamed, like it was inflicted not years ago but quite recently and had just started to heal. Next to the boy there was a round glasses with a curve handle clumsily fixed with duct tape and some book that kid apparently read before sleep.
A very short life of that kid was already difficult and full of losses - orphaned since the infancy, in a loveless house, with people that hated not only him but everything he was. He was completely helpless to the world that already worshiped him like a savior, willing to use him like a pawn and didn't even interested in him - only in what he could give to this world, what he was ready to sacrifice for this world's good. A little boy on whose fragile shoulders weighed alas too much, as by the will of the case, as by conscious actions of too many people.
And as though in answer to all silent pleadings that he sometimes whispered to himself while crying before going to sleep, the the silence of the night was interrupted by the chain of completely incomprehensible phenomena. The sleeping boy suddenly frowned as if his peaceful sleep was disturbed by something unexpectable and very unpleasant; if he - or anybody of inhabitats of number four house, - was awake, they would feel the heavy unnatural stuffiness that has fallen over the house. It seemed like the air around the kid became thicken, motionless and even somewhat material. For a little while longer, nothing more strange didn't happened.
Then, without any warning, the inflamed scar on boy's forehead pulled itself tight and burst with a rather unpleasant sound. A trickles of blood flowed down his nose and cheeks, when a veins under the boy's skin began to bulge changing his facial features, while black hair turned gray until became dazzling white. From the open wound on the forehead a puff of dark gray smoke broke out desperately twitching and trembling when it was engulfed in flames from nowhere. A silent but piercing scream was heard continued in single instant, and then fire went out. Nothing left behind after - not a single spark.
The bulged veins, meanwhile, gradually decreased and paled until disappeared under the skin - but still the boy wasn't looked the same way he looked when he went to sleep tonight. His fase although similar to his previous, was still somehow different, and his hair stayed white. The most strange thing though was that for some reason these quick changes in his body didn't awakened him, only when it's all was over, the boy suddenly took a deep breath and opened his eyes.
The green color of grass that was inherited him by his late mother, now colored in a creepy blood-red color.
The Dark Lord who was once called Harry Potter as a child lived a very long life. He crossed unseen boundary that divided living and dead thrice over these years - the first one as an innocent child whose future was bought by his mother's blood, the second one as the sacrifice who gave himself to die for the lives of others, and the third one as a coward who tried to escape inevitable. He was holding on to this opportunity with all his stubbornness, in desperate desire to maintain the last crumbs of hope that he still had after the indescribable nightmare that his life had become.
Frankly speaking, he didn't really expected it to work; he new that only very few wizards had audacity to even think about doing the same thing that Harry was going to do, not to mention the fact that most of magical knowledge was irretrievably lost by the end of his life. So his attempt was more an act of hopelessness than conscious calculation for a successful outcome - and yet even cautious assumption, even the hint that it could be possible was enough for that idea to become the goal and meaning of his existence in the last ineteen years.
The few clues still remained by the time had to be obtained bit by bit - and even then they were at least incomplete and often contradict each other. He had to compose a ritual by himself by tenacious effort over a long period of time, making mistakes at every step of the way and consistently fixing them. He had to compose a ritual by himself by tenacious effort over a long period of time, making mistakes at every step of the way and consistently fixing them. He didn't care of what he had to do to finish his work - he lied and seduced, manipulated and killed, stole and betrayed, played as dirty as he could, used all sorts of methods to to get what he wanted. And by doing things that he as a child would have seemed repugnant, he didn't hesitate at all.
In any case, what else could he spend his life on? His life path began to wane, everything and everyone he loved was taken from him, and the world he fought, suffered and died for was now in ruins. Pain and regret were the only things that remained; and if he had to learn several dead languages only to be able to read some important spells or to wage wars just for the most rare potion ingredients, to him it was just another day when he come a step closer to turning his hope into reality. Perhaps, only due to this he eventually succeeded.
Regaining consciousness again was ad nauseam unpleasant feeling. The first he felt was like he swam in the deep ocean for a long time resisted the enormous pressure of the water column with all of his ability, and then finally he came up to the surface. Taking a deep frantically breath he opened his eyes; all his body was trembling. For a while, he could hardly tell who he was at all and where he was - his head was buzzing from the fog that reigned in it, where images of painful memories of his distant past flashed continuously, interspersed with painful visions that could easily drive an unprepared person to mad.
There were no words to describe what he had to endure during the ritual - even after making sure that everything was prepared correctly, and any mistakes were excluded, Harry knew that success was not at all guaranteed to him. The consequences of what he set out to do were horrendous, and physical death was still a relatively happy outcome compared to the risk of soul shattering, dooming Harry to the same fate that befell Riddle's afterlife, or worse, his fall outside of the universe, which would leave him with no other option than to wander in the space between worlds in the hope that he could someday cling to at least some dimension.
However, even despite all this, Harry knew that Death had a special account for him; after all, he was the last living Peverell at that time, and, in addition, the Master of Death, who managed to collect her Hallows all at once. This, of course, did not give him the slightest power over her, but made him much more aware of the essence of other, spiritual worlds - places where higher powers lived. Yet nothing could ever have prepared him for when he finally came face to face with her. Morrígan, Hel, Anubis, Ereshkigal, Thanatos, the Fourth Horseman on a Pale Horse, and the Third of the Ruling Sisters... She went by hundreds if not thousands of names, and yet none of them came close to describing what she was.
Only Dementors, perhaps, could be those who showed the world an approximate, most primitive likeness of her; a creature whose breath blew through in gusts of icy wind, whose voice—loud and cracked—was like dry leaves rustling in a graveyard. Unthinkable in its unnaturalness, a monster that had too many eyes, too many arms, too many mouths - the very presence of which seemed to suck life out of everything that surrounded it, like a metaphysical "black hole" of colossal proportions. Harry was grateful that he had mostly forgotten the meeting with the Eternal Lady - otherwise he wasn't sure he would have been able to sleep.
As soon as the multi-colored spots stopped dancing in front of his eyes, and Harry was finally able to hold his gaze, he found himself looking at the all too familiar tiny space that his dear relatives had allocated to him instead of a normal room. Of course, having lived a lifetime, he almost forgot about his very lonely childhood, about the seemingly endless nights spent in the cupboard under the stairs - but what was still preserved in his memory seemed exactly the same as he now saw his little cubicle. Even the web-covered corners, accompanied by the company of three black spiders sitting on it, were present.
Harry just lay on the old mattress for a while, completely still, breathing rapidly, unevenly, and trying with all his might to recover; most of all, at the moment, he wanted to burst into tears and laugh hysterically at the same time - simply from the realization that all the years spent were not in vain, that everything, one way or another, turned out. However Harry, accustomed in old age not to waste precious time, finally sat up sharply on the mattress, then swaying slightly and grabbing one of the dirty pipes with a small hand, closing his eyes tightly, as he suffered a severe attack of nausea again.
Right now he was more grateful than ever for the half-starved life he had led in the Dursleys' house, because he certainly didn't want to splatter the remnants of last night's dinner on his mattress. After waiting until he felt better again, Harry opened his eyes and only then felt something hot flowing down his cheeks. Unhooking from the pipe, he carefully touched his cheek with his fingers - to the touch it was viscous and sticky, -and wrinkled his nose because of a metallic smell. He was more than sure what it was (even if he felt completely different from what he expected), and raised his fingers to his own face, staring at the blood glistening in the dim light of the bulb.
The raw, tingling sensation in his forehead that he hadn't noticed until this moment (he was so accustomed to the pain in the scar from his youth that he learned to ignore it, for better or for worse) made itself felt again, and Harry instantly understood , what happened to him. However, he never refused the opportunity to see for himself personally - besides, it was a good way to check whether his magical abilities, honed and well-trained over the years, remained with him.
The boy waved his hand in the air, as if trying to ward off a mosquito that was botheringly flitting in front of his face, and smiled as an antique-looking silver hand mirror, encrusted with diamonds and engraved with the House of Black coat of arms, appeared in front of his face. In the reflection, Harry was staring at the pale face of an eight-year-old child with a blood-red eyes and snow-white, disheveled hair, which, by the way, had already begun to get wet from the blood flowing down his nose and cheeks from an open wound on his forehead. A wound that could only mean one thing - Riddle's Horcrux was no longer in his body.
Given this fact, what was happening could only mean that the "touch of Death" that Harry experienced so long ago had somehow spread to his young, eight-year-old body as well, and the former Dark Lord could not decide if this was good or bad thing. On the one hand, the title of the Master of Death brought many advantages with it, which Lord Potter, having lost his youthful idealism, did not mind using in his own interests at all. On the other hand, it slightly modified his magical signature, which means that any of his enemies could understand that he had made contact with the Hallows, even if he tried to disguise it.
Harry, having decided to think about it later, focused and silently cast a series of wandless healing spells of his own design on himself; the blood instantly flowed in the opposite direction, as if "sucking" into the wound, until it was completely absorbed, making it possible to see the familiar lightning-shaped scar, now looking even more inflamed and bleeding than, in Harry's memory, it was in his younger years. Unfortunately, it was not possible to completely heal the wound with improvised means - the creation of a Horcrux was one of the darkest magical rituals, and any Dark Magic, as is known, had a strong resistance to any kind of curing.
Be it Muggle or Magical, otherwise Moody would not have had to walk around with an artificial eye, a wooden prosthesis and an almost completely missing nose.
After giving himself first aid to the best of his ability (he so much missed her excellent talent for healin- stop, don't think about her!), Harry decided that the late night outside was the best time to start planning: he wasn't going to play along with his enemies, trying to keep the timeline as close to the original as possible, only for not to arouse suspicion - no, he, Mordred damn it, was the Dark Lord and the king of New Locres, and that meant something! No, he would change the past as much as he could - after all, Fate owed him anyway for being her pawn for so long.
And that meant he didn't plan on staying in this house a second longer than the circumstances required.
Another wave of his hand, and a notebook in a richly decorated leather cover fell into his palm; the sheets in it were of parchment, and the rings were of gold, in addition, there were two leather straps that firmly held a large, bluish-green Augurey feather in a gilded and diamond-encrusted frame. Self-refilling, self-writing, with built-in spell checking and the ability to change the color of the ink, of course - sometimes having access to the wrong side of the space, which in his time had long been accustomed to simply calling the "flipside", was extremely useful, and Harry, preparing the ritual, planned to use these advantages as much as possible.
“So, Voldemort,” thought the former Dark Lord, when the notebook opened by itself and the quill began to write in it on its own, being finely tuned to the thoughts transmitted by him with the help of Legilimency. As ridiculous as it may sound (considering the Prophecy and everything that came with it), Riddle was perhaps the least dangerous threat to him, and all for one simple reason - he was completely, entirely and irreparably crazy. The most total psycho, a lunatic maniac whose frail mask of sanity shattered into pieces like fallen porcelain if anything upset the Heir (ha!) of Slytherin.
For many, such behavior made him dangerous, perhaps even frightening, inspiring subconscious horror, which in its time made an entire generation of adult and sane people afraid to pronounce his idiotic anagram. For Harry, on the other hand, especially for such a Harry like him, Riddle had always been predictable in the extreme; however, this may have been facilitated by the presence of a fragment of Voldemort's soul in his, Lord Potter's, body, as well as the ability to regularly look into his mind, perceiving the thoughts and feelings of the dark wizard.
Given this, the plan was soon drawn up as quickly as possible and looked like this:
Riddle/Voldemort
- Destroy all soul anchors as soon as possible;
- Prevent Quirrell's possession or eliminate/neutralize him (in case of failure);
- Mostly avoid confrontation (unless absolutely necessary);
- Prevent any resurrection attempts (Pettigrew?);
- In case of resurrection - eliminate at the first opportunity (gain of time).
Death Eaters
- Take control of the organization from Riddle;
- Legalize as a legitimate political movement;
- The goal is the non-violent acquisition of power (Riddle's experience from a.t.l. 1997-1998).
The fifth point was the most important here. Harry had never understood why White Bumblebee was so stubborn about not killing Riddle, despite the fact that, in the Dark Lord's memory, the old man had had the opportunity several times. Moreover, he did not understand why everyone looked at this, albeit temporary, solution as something bad - Voldemort's previous "disappearance" had won fourteen years of peace for the British magical community, and Harry saw nothing wrong with repeating a similar result. Yes, Riddle could still return eventually, but the Chosen One would have had time to hone his magic skills and find all of his Horcruxes without having to hide in a tent in the middle of nowhere with bounty hunters on his heels.
The Death Eater-related points were, to a greater extent, a kind of "insurance", "airbag" and a foundation for the near future. In many respects, the way how The Second Blood Supremacy War ended was to blame for the fate that befell his old world, where he came from. In fact, Harry hasn't been mad about White Bumblebee's manipulations through his entire life and forcing to play the "sacrificial lamb" at the end; in his long life he did the same thing, and, moreover, not just once. No, the problem was not in the very fact of use, but in what goals this use had, and this was precisely what the Dark Lord Potter had deep problems with.
So, as a minimum, his goal was to prevent the death of so many pureblood wizards in an absolutely senseless meat grinder unleashed by a snake-faced psycho, and as a maximum, also to remove that bastard's slavish stigma, that was sucking the family magic and vitality out of many of them. If they also start to "be fruitful and multiply", Harry will only be glad. The number of wizards was already dangerously small, and the situation certainly did not get better in the future. Fortunately, having spent a decent number of years as the ruler of his own magical kingdom on the smoking, mud-drowned ruins of the old world, the former Dark Lord was confident that he could cope with the leadership of a relatively small rebel organization.