Chapter 1
Notes:
tw
pov character is abusive
pureblood supremacist rhetoric
abusive behaviours: starvation, torture (psychological, physical, sexual, magical), coercion, coerced actions, murder, coerced sex (aka rape), manipulation, kidnapping/keeping a person captive, the word "master" and "pet", death,
Chapter Text
1.
When Harry Potter walks into the Forest of Dean, head held high and eyes spaced out, Voldemort wants to croon in victory. He tells the boy to face his death and Harry Potter says nothing, seemingly willing to die.
Voldemort has spent seventy years perfecting immortality. He has survived the Blitz, Dumbledore’s keen eye, a rebounded Killing Curse, the creation of five horcruxes, and countless adversaries - all crushed beneath his heel, as is to be expected. He hasn’t done so by being incurious.
“Very well, Harry Potter,” hisses the Dark Lord, wand aloft. “You are ready to die, are you? Let me be the judge of that. Legillimens. ” The look of terror that flits across the boy’s face is a moment that will fuel Voldemort’s daydreams for months to come. The Boy Who Lived, courageous idiotic imbecilic Gryffindor, brought to fear. Finally.
What he learns is not a cherished moment. He cannot repress the phantom emptiness when he realises that Harry Potter has killed five pieces of his soul and he didn’t feel a single one. Voldemort had always assumed he would feel such a thing. He has not yet begun to mourn the loss of his precious Nagini to the Longbottom brute and now, to be bombarded with the knowledge that this sneaky, despicable, ire-inducing boy has been trouncing behind his back, all of these years, killing him, slowly and methodically, is unfathomably rage inducing. “ Crucio. ”
As the boy writhes on the ground, Voldemort’s anger is not at all soothed by the sound of bones popping and skin tearing. Crucio typically puts a dent in his highly strung fury but it is for naught, now. Nothing can heal the psychic wound that Harry Potter came to this forest to die because Harry Potter is his horcrux.
The Death Eaters hoot and catcall as Potter screams bloody murder. Voldemort stops before he makes the boy a vegetable - he has much greater plans to put into place. His inner circle, Bellatrix, Evan, Severus, Antonin, Rodolphus, Rabastan, and Walden, has been decimated in this battle over Hogwarts. Severus, the traitor, killed by Nagini’s fatal bite. Bellatrix, murdered by the Weasley matriarch. Rodolphus and Rabastan, dead side by side in the dirt, their pure blood forever lost. All great characters, lost to war.
Voldemort will avenge his fallen brethren and rid the world of the scourge of the muggles and muggleborns. This, he knows, is inevitable.
Harry Potter is the linchpin keeping his victory just out of sight. Harry Potter is the martyr of the Light, a symbol of hope, a false flag of victory. Harry Potter will kneel before Voldemort before the year is out and call him master - in front of all of his serfs and servants. For now, however…
“Harry Potter is dead,” Voldemort instructs the attentive Evan Rosier. He arches his wand, in a great show of magic, and the wide-eyed Potter still recovering from his just desserts watches as the Dread Lord Voldemort creates a faultless copy of him. It will be the perfect illusion to erode the morale of the masses. “Take this golem to the half-breed groundskeeper, make it believable.”
“Yes, master,” says Evan, gleefully, his golden mask chipped in places and robes bloodied. He hauls the golem over his shoulders in a fireman’s lift.
“What,” Potter has the audacity to speak, voice hoarse from screaming, “are you going to do with me?” He is beginning to lift himself from the ground. Walden gives him a rightful kick in the ribs and Potter groans like a beaten dog, curling up to protect his most significant organs.
“ Stupefy. ” As much as Voldemort would like to gloat to his new whipping boy, he knows that Potter is much like a cockroach. He is incredibly hard to kill and scatters whenever would be most inconvenient for his plans. And I will not let you get away this time, Harry Potter.
For you are mine.
Breathily, Voldemort tells his three remaining most trusted that if they so much as think too loudly over the truth of Potter’s existence that he will find out, he will punish them, and they will never recover. His servants nod warily, threat acknowledged, but Voldemort knows the truth will out.
Once this battle is won, he wants it very well known that Harry Potter is in his clutches, that their Golden Boy is suffering, that there is nothing they can do to rescue him.
/
Hogwarts cedes to the power of Lord Voldemort. The Order rats scatter, a few surviving, but it is no concern to the Great Lord Voldemort. His Snatchers will catch them and bring them to him. With his position of power in the Ministry, Voldemort rolls out new initiatives like the sterilisation of werewolves, the muggleborn registry, and irons out sentences for those guilty of fraternising with muggles, muggleborns, and Undesirables. He allows an amnesty for purebloods willing to convert to his regime changes and is gratified that many Hogwarts alumni choose the might of the greatest Dark Lord to roam this land since Morgana herself.
And best of all, Harry Potter rots away in the dungeons of Riddle Manor, a highly kept secret known only to his most loyal few. To Voldemort’s dismay, none of his inner circle has breathed a word over Potter’s residence at the boot of his fickle mercy. He had hoped to weed out more traitors, smoke out some of the remaining Order rats, and watch his servants’ aristocratic faces wince in torment as he meted out his punishments. No matter, Voldemort decides, after six weeks of Harry Potter starving, blind, tied up, and crucio ’d whenever the mood strikes, with no one the wiser. I will simply make an announcement.
This is what broadcasts over the Wizarding Wireless the following night. Voldemort’s speeches are mandatory listening for all ages and play in public squares and this, he thinks, may be his best speech yet. “Dear loyal subjects, tonight your Minister of Magic brings you bright news to coinsign with the six month anniversary of my arrival into office. Former Undesirable Number One, Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, resides in my care as part of a half-blooded reformation programme. With my help, I believe that even the most resistant individuals can be brought to heel and bring us into a new age of peace and prosperity.” He continues on for half an hour, relishing in his victory, and is gratified when he receives a howler from Ginny Weasley. Her voice fills his manor, no doubt reaching the dungeons, and says, in a shrill indignant tone that makes him wonder how the Weasley women ever find men deaf enough to mate them, “Harry! We’re coming for you! Hold in there!”
Voldemort manages to trace her magic to a recently abandoned hide-out in the Forbidden Forest. Order of the Phoenix rats have been hiding there, moving every few days, to avoid the scrutiny of Snatchers who have their names and faces imprinted into their brains with a handy spell called intaglio. It is the closest they have gotten to their location in weeks.
Voldemort does not despair at having missed them. Instead, he celebrates her declaration. He hosts a muggle-baiting revelry in Malfoy Manor and sips at a goblet of steamed goblin blood whilst the next generation of pure-bloods dance in the ballroom. All is well in Voldemort’s kingdom. All, however slow, will come to heel.
Knowing how hungry for both sustenance and human contact Potter must be, it is the night of his announcement that he brings Potter upstairs. His secondary cage contains a double bed, a warded glass window, and a wardrobe filled with women’s dresses. So I begin, he thinks, watching the boy sleep away, fidgeting and moaning discontentedly. So I create my pet.
/
Potter is resistant at first, despite his time spent in the dungeons. Voldemort no doubt assumes that this would take longer if he hadn’t done his stint in the dark. He considers Potter primed but not ready. He needs attention, interaction, and training or else he will atrophy.
It would be easy to break the boy, to violate him, to take his dignity and voice away. It would be too easy. It would end too quickly. Human brains adjust to trauma - they dissociate and do anything they must to survive. Voldemort does not want a doll but a player who is conscious of his choices and makes them anyway, agonised and tormented by them.
He begins with a simple ultimatum. “Say yes, master and I will allow you to write a letter to your friends.”
Potter alternates between a mute defiance, shouting obscenities, and attempting to curse him without a wand (to no success, such a pitiful adversary ). Voldemort simply repeats his ultimatum, waiting for the words to crawl under Potter’s skin, slowly but surely wearing away at him. He casts Goerguk’s Sleeping Curse on Potter every night before bed so that he will intrude on Potter’s dreams. The boy will have to think of him, whether he wants to or not.
“Only once, Potter,” croons Voldemort. “Just say it, yes, master , and you can write whatever you like. Imagine that, two words and you could lead your friends directly to you.”
Potter stares at the ground. He is still in his rags from the dungeons. When he saw the dresses in the wardrobe, he didn’t speak for two days. Voldemort knew he was angry and ashamed and that would only make it all the sweeter when he surrendered.
“What would they think, your friends, if they knew that you wouldn’t say two words? Two words that could let you see them again?” Voldemort says, wonderingly.
“Yes, master,” Harry Potter grits out, green with disgust. Much like his beautiful green eyes that he inherited from his mudblood mother. How Voldemort longs to scoop out those eyes and pickle them so that they may sit on his mantle, a totem of eternal ownership.
Patience, patience.
Voldemort summons a quill, ink pot, and parchment and watches as Harry Potter writes a sincere and desperate letter to his friends. He writes everything he knows of where he is, reassures them he is still alive, and tells them he loves them. Gleefully, Voldemort snatches the letter from Potter’s hands and says, “Thank you, pet.”
When he leaves the room, he incinerates the letter, satisfied that Potter is one step closer to surrender.
It is a great boon when Antonin’s head pops up through his floo. His servant tells him, with a doggish enthusiasm, that two of Potter’s friends have been captured - the Lovegood girl and the boy who beheaded his darling Nagini. They are sent through and stored in adjoining cells in the Riddle Dungeons. Voldemort convinces Lovegood to take the Mark after promising that she can see Potter - too easy - and Longbottom is a tidy figure, standing on a small platform, blinded, deafened, and left to whimper as Voldemort carves revenge into him for weeks.
He offers Potter his second ultimatum after Lovegood is allowed to visit. Her Mark is still inflamed and tender but she allows Potter to touch it, to embrace her, to prove that she is real. After a half hour of Potter crying and Lovegood sighing and swaying like a leaf in the breeze, Voldemort cuts their visit short.
“Call me master, ” Voldemort says, airily, “and Lovegood will be allowed to visit whenever it pleases you.”
“Master,” Potter intones dully.
“Like you mean it, ” he hisses the last in parseltongue. Potter’s green eyes flash with resentment as he sits in his comfortable double bed, magically bound to this room. He eats only stale bread and cold unsalted beans, his figure diminishing as his weeks of resistance continue.
“I will never mean it! Don’t you get that, you sicko? I will never, never, ever, never, never, ever mean it.”
Voldemort casts crucio in frustration - breaking his two day crucio -free streak. He’s been trying to cut down, as the higher society witches say, as he’s found that dark magic is far too good at stealing away his sanity. If he is to conquer the entire world, he needs to have the restraint required to endure political negotiations and internal coups.
And Potter made me break my streak. The spell flares up with a bright vindictive energy. As Potter writhes, wringing out some of his rage but not enough to satisfy, he simply says, “We shall see.”
With that, he leaves Potter alone. He doesn’t visit him but instead keeps a close eye on Lovegood as she begins her Death Eater integration programme. She is adjusting remarkably well to his kingdom. It’s Ministry mandated for any converters from the Old Crowd. He assigns Walder as her mentor, knowing that he will keep a strict eye on her on his behalf.
It takes two weeks for Potter to crack. Voldemort’s scrying spells reveal him banging and clawing at the walls, screaming master over and over as if it’s a prayer that will cure him of his entrapment. Voldemort waits a day before he appears in Potter’s chambers, like a dark angel from dust. The boy is still dressed in his rags and has piled up days worth of bread on the other side of the room. A hunger strike, to be expected.
“Eat,” the Dark Lord instructs, “and then you shall see Lovegood.”
“Yes,” Harry swallows the word down like it chafes, “master.” But it is genuine.
Good. The victory is sweet and lasts all night. He fantasises of the future, of Harry on his knees, face scrunched in self-hate and abandon as he takes what Voldemort has, as he surrenders.
Lovegood is briefed on what is an appropriate topic of conversation for Harry. No Order, no news from the outside, no discussing his letter ( best let Harry think his friends have abandoned him ), no talk of Voldemort’s laws or anything resembling a flaw. Lovegood follows his advice easily and spends her sessions with Harry playing with his hair and speaking about fabricated creatures like Nargles and Whippersnaps.
And yes, Voldemort did his due diligence into researching these illusionary beasts and came back with no evidence or historical writings on them. “Loony” Lovegood is, as her nickname suggests, a lunatic.
He contemplates Longbottom and what he shall do with him. He is running out of painful methods to extract his revenge and has resorted to siccing his untrained and sadistic Death Eaters on the Gryffindor. Gryffindors, he muses, a dying breed ever since I excised their House. No child will be Sorted there, ever again.
He is growing bored with Longbottom’s pain, with his growing dissociation, with his dwindling begging. The boy is ever closer to the shell that his parents are in St. Mungo’s. Bellatrix never did know how to pace out her play. Lord Voldemort misses her and her insanity, perhaps the most of all his fallen servants. As he contemplates the past and the future, he tests out a variety of experimental potions on Longbottom, mostly to see what they would do to a living wizard.
/
Voldemort’s third ultimatum is extremely enjoyable. He realises a use for the Longbottom boy not a moment too soon. Just as he contemplates putting him out of his misery - as Longbottom has taken to begging over everyday - he recalls that Harry’s friends are no small boon in his hands. As much as Harry is disinclined to care about his personal safety, his friends are a beautifully exploitable weakness.
He can simply say, “Longbottom is alive and beneath us as we speak. If you wish for him to continue to live, you will wear the dresses.”
And miraculously, Harry Potter, broken and beaten down and agonised, slips out of his rags and into a fluffy pink dress. The humiliation on his face is priceless and it is no small trade on Voldemort’s part since Harry has not called for continued ‘proof of life’ or any real evidence. It is Voldemort’s insistence that Harry must take his master at his word, that Lovegood’s continued arrivals, unharmed and well-fed, are proof enough that he is a merciful lord. Harry is the last person to see Longbottom before he dies, unknown to them both. The boys embrace, Longbottom cries hopefully, and Harry laughs in a deranged sort of fashion that it’s hardly a chore to wear girl’s clothes if it will keep you alive.
Longbottom leaves the room, eyes wide and wary. Voldemort smiles in a sinister fashion and, as Harry prances about in his petticoats, he executes Neville Longbottom in the hallway, only metres away from his friend. He has an indelicate thrill when he contemplates what else he wishes for his new puppet to do.
/
Over the course of two years, he takes his time in removing Harry from anything he once loved about himself. It is a cold and unending revenge in order to force the boy to make up for his killed soul pieces. Harry Potter will live forever under the cruel and sadistic thumb of the man who he has made immortal; a pet, a plaything, a servant, but most of all, a player.
His piece de la resistance is capturing both the muggles that raised Harry and his two best friends, Weasley and the mudblood. He puts them all in the dungeons together and listens to them fight, cry, and resist uselessly. He takes Harry down, wearing a green sequin gown, wearing his Dark Mark, wearing his hickeys and bruises and remnants of countless ultimatums, and says, calmly, “Pet, I give you a choice once more. If you kill your muggles with your bare hands, I will let your friends live, despite the acts of terror they have inflicted onto my great nation.”
And Harry Potter says those beautiful two words, “yes, master.” and strangles his relatives, one by one, face stone cold, as Weasley and the mudblood watch. It is everything Voldemort ever wanted from this project. It is the fruition of countless hours of hardship. He has made Harry Potter a murderer and has shown his status to his oldest and dearest Order rats.
That night, after a few rounds of victory sex, lying in bed, he makes his declaration of conquest. A final hurrah, a nail in the coffin of the mythos of Harry Potter, Boy Who Lived. “I vaniquish you, Harry Potter, by making you a different man entirely. You surely cannot say you are the same person who raised me from the dead, four years ago? You are marked by me,” he traces a cruel and loving finger over his horcruxes’ scar. “You have killed for me, changed for me, given me pleasure. You are mine.”
Green eyes flash with determination. “I will never be yours, Voldemort.” And the pet pulls out a wand - where did he get that? - and before Voldemort can blink, casts, “ Avada kedavra. ”
Fool, Voldemort thinks. Does he not know that I can only die if he dies also?
As his spirit hangs above in the room, he wonders how long it will take for him to reanimate this time and how he will punish his wilful pet. The panic only truly descends when Harry Potter turns the wand on himself and casts the Killing Curse, ending the life of Lord Vodemort forever.
Harry is not so lucky.
Chapter 2
Notes:
tw for reflections on past traumatic events that occurred or were referenced from chapter 1
refusal to eat
brief mentions of: suicide, major character death
Chapter Text
2.
“I did it,” Harry says, numbly. It doesn’t feel like it’s over. It doesn’t feel like it will ever be over.
“He’s dead?” Ron asks, hope burning within him. “You killed that fucker?” His best mate is crying happy tears, flushed with adoration and relief as Harry undoes his binds. “Harry, you saved us all!”
Did I?
“Harry…” Hermione cups his face once her hands are free. She has rope burns on her wrists. God, I hope Voldemort didn’t do anything else to her while she was here . “Harry, are you still with us?”
“It’s over,” whispers Harry, knowing exactly why it feels like Voldemort still won, when he knows that everything the maniac stole from him cannot be returned.
“Let’s get you out of here,” Ron says, urgently. He is gaunt and carries a hunted look about him. “Someone could be back at any moment.”
“It’s not quite over,” Hermione confesses, as she drags him out of Riddle Manor. “It is brilliant that You Know Who is dead but he has Death Eaters in every office in the Ministry. It’s not safe for us in England, Harry.” All he can think is that it’s been so long since he’s seen her. Years? It’s been years, hasn’t it? It must have been. It can’t have just felt that long. With a pop, she apparates, her hand wrapped around Harry in a vice-like grip.
I wonder if she’ll be able to stand touching me when she knows what Voldemort has done to me… when she knows what I agreed to… “Luna,” Harry whispers, urgently, “they still have Luna.”
Ron shakes his head, solemnly. “Lovegood converted, Harry. She’s one of them now.”
“No! No, she only did it for me!” Luna has been with him through so much of this. She has talked him through so many difficult decisions. He’d be dead without her. He’d be less than dead, he’d be an Inferius.
“She killed muggles,” Hermione tells him, softly. They’re in a forest. Harry doesn’t recognise it but it feels cold and unwelcoming. The world is so big. Harry is so small. He’s lived in a room for two years, abused and manipulated, yes, but also protected and hidden. All done at the hands of the most powerful man to ever walk the earth.
Or was that another lie, seeing as I killed him?
“No. She wouldn’t.” Luna could never. She was just like Harry. She was trapped. She’s Luna, for fuck’s sake! Have Ron and Hermione lost the plot? She’d never kill someone. Never, never.
She’s all I have. Please, tell me it’s not true.
“Mate,” Ron puts a hand on Harry’s shoulder and it feels so foreign that he wants to puke. “She’s a Death Eater. The only way you can stay one is by killing muggles and muggleborns. If she’s alive, free to roam, she’s one of them.”
The world is so small, at that moment. Harry throws up his world class breakfast onto the ground, remembering what he needed to do to earn it.
“She did what she had to in order to survive,” Hermione says, decisively. “It’s immoral and unforgivable and wrong, but that’s what she did. She’s chosen her side. It’s just the wrong one.”
“Did you get my letter?” Harry breathes out, eyes bright. “Why didn’t you reply to my letter?” My first mistake, Harry thinks, broodingly. I called him master and then everything started slipping out of my control.
“We never received a letter, mate.” Ron is sickeningly sympathetic.
“That bastard! That rat fucking bastard! I knew it. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.” Harry paces and Hermione catches his arm so that he doesn’t walk outside of the ward line. “He never sent it. He’d never admit it to me. He insisted, he said it was insulting, he said to trust him, he said you just didn’t care, you’d given up on me, you were disgusted with me, you-”
“Harry, woah, woah.” Pale as a sheet, Ron Weasley flicks out his wand. He casts a patronus and instead of a scruffy jack russell-terrier, a white and glowing stag trots out of his wand. “We never gave up. It, um,” Ron flushes, “my patronus changed a week after you were taken.”
The heaviness that has been chasing him since he believed Voldemort lightens, if only a little. Jittery and amped up on adrenalin, wondering if his friends can ever look at him the same after what he did to the Dursleys, Harry stops his pacing. He sits on the ground and feels the grass in his fingers. He hadn’t expected to survive his own avada kedavra. He hadn’t planned to be saved.
“Just, I’m sorry, Harry,” Hermione bites her lip. She’s grown up too. Like Ron, she’s skinny, unhealthily so, and has lost a lot of her naivete and glow. Her hair is cut incredibly short and sits just above her ears. This Hermione Granger wouldn’t have suggested SPEW - she’d never have assumed it was possible. “I need to check, were you with him the entire time?”
“Yes,” he says, green eyes dull. “Voldemort has had me this entire time.”
“Fuck!” Ron glances around wildly. He and Hermione exchange coded glances before grabbing onto Harry and apparating again. For a moment, Harry hears pops as Snatchers apparate into their hiding place before the world disappears into the jolting tug of interspatial travel.
“Sorry, fuck, I’m sorry.” Harry resists the urge to fall to his knees and kiss their shoes. He’s terrified, it’s a programmed response. He feels like he’s about to be crucio ’d.
“Hey, s’okay.” Ron sits with him as he panics whilst Hermione sets up a new warded circle. They’re in a different forest now. The leaves are greener and lighter. Harry can hear running water. “You’re not used to the Taboo anymore.”
I’m not used to any of this, anymore. I don’t know how to be a person anymore, Ron.
“I wish we could stay here longer and decompress but we really need to get moving, Harry,” Hermione offers, her hands moving frantically as she sorts through her magically expanded handbag.
“Where are we going?”
It is with a sting of betrayal that Harry watches Ron awkwardly shake his head. “Sorry, mate. Need to know basis. It’s one of ‘Mione’s crazy rules that have saved us more than once. No one except them knows the details.”
Hermione pulls out a glowing green orb, the colour of death, the colour of Harry slaying his master and freeing himself and the entirety of magical England from the chains of a megalomaniac. He wants to cry so badly that he starts to laugh. “Harry, focus,” she says, urgently. She and her both place their hands onto the orb in a practised way. He follows their lead. The orb is clammy and still.
Like Dudley’s eyes when Harry took his hands away.
“MACUSA Anti-Terrorism office,” she says. A sticky film soaks over all of their hands and up their arms, like a noxious glow-in-the-dark skin paint.
“What is this?” Harry asks, nervously, as the goo consumes him.
“It’s something George made called a Sink Ball.” Ron explains and Harry understands why it has that name. The slow creeping ooze gives him a distinct sinking sensation, as if he is slowly being submerged in a body of water. “It feels awful, doesn't it?”
“It’s untraceable by any modern methods and the safest way to travel long distances. It’s just a little, er, uncomfortable.” Hermione hums, preoccupied with where they are headed.
Ron laughs. “That’s an understatement.”
After five minutes of slow creeping discomfort, Harry is completely covered in goo. It covers his eyes, ears, and mouth. He breathes shallowly through his nose until that too is covered. Just as the panic sets in, as he is about to tear his face out and break for air, the goo subsides. It is just as slow to be uncovered by it but when he opens his eyes, he is no longer in the forest but an office building, not entirely dissimilar to the overthrown Ministry of Magic in England.
“Amazing work as usual, Granger,” a middle-aged woman who is as tall as Hermione’s hip remarks. “Apologies for the slowness, Mr. Potter. This is unfortunately the safest way to traffick asylum seekers.”
They scrape the goo off of them manually so as to speed up the process. Once marginally clean and able to move and speak, the woman who introduces herself as Francesca Gerkle leads the three of them into her office. Harry and Ron remain standing whereas Hermione sits on the other side of the desk, the only chair in this room.
“Terribly sorry about this,” Gerkle says as she ruffles through the papers on her desk. “We’ve been slammed this week with British asylum seekers. Of course, I put a rush in for Granger and her colleagues but we still have some processing to do.” With an American brand pen that Harry doesn’t recognise, Gerkle taps the end of it with her wand and it presses its nib into the paper. It’s rather modern, by the wizarding standards that Harry has grown accustomed to at Hogwarts.
Even Voldemort used parchment and quills.
“Hermione Granger,” says Hermione. Harry watches, reading the print upside down, as the pen scribes Hermione Granger in green ink.
“Ron Weasley.” His ink is red.
“Francesca Gerkle, director of Mag Anti-Terrorism.” Hers is a rather dull black. “If you would, Mr. Potter.”
“Harry Potter.” Harry Potter, the pen writes. It’s in gold and Harry realises that he can’t relate to that colour anymore. It used to be his favourite.
“Right,” Gerkle smiles tightly. “The quicker we get into the meat of it, the quicker I’ll have you processed. So, Mr. Potter, Granger and her associate claim that you’ve been kidnapped by the UK terrorist agent known as Lord Voldemort and held hostage by him, against your will, for,” she scans a paper, “a little over two years. Is this correct?” Gerkles’ perfunctory tone crawls under his skin.
She says it so easily.
“We didn’t claim anything!” Ron insists. “It’s only the truth!”
Gerkle sighs. “We’ve been over this, Mr. Weasley. I only say claim because that is how it must be phrased in the paperwork. With both you and Granger as witnesses, I see no reason why Mr. Potter won’t be processed with due haste. Now,” she raises an eyebrow, “will you let me record Mr. Potter’s testimony?”
“Yes, sorry,” mumbles Ron. His presence in the room is both a boon and a bane to Harry. He feels the support from both of his long lost friends and yet is deeply ashamed to have done the things he’s done. To have agreed to Voldemort’s demands. Can they ever forgive me?
“That is correct. Voldemort kidnapped me from a battle at Hogwarts. He sent a golem in my place and made it seem as if I was dead.”
The pen writes this down dutifully and word for word, to his relief. He’s had enough Quick Quotes Quills for a lifetime.
“He kidnapped you from the Battle of Hogwarts,2 May 1998?” Gerkle reiterates. When Harry nods, she says, “In words, if you please, Mr. Potter.”
“Yes,” he says. “I do not know the exact date but it was from a stand we took at Hogwarts. It was the day that I saw Ron and Hermione for the last time.”
“That was the 2nd of May,” Hermione backs him up. “I have an entry in my journal if you need to cross reference it.”
“No, your testimony is fine. Thank you for the offer, Granger.” Gerkle flicks to another page and asks, just as neutrally, “As a captive of Lord Voldemort, would you describe him as violent, abusive, and/or coercive?”
Harry’s mouth goes dry. “Yes.”
“Did he ever deprive you of meals as a method of control?”
He kept me in a dungeon and starved for the first however many weeks. It could have been months because I had no way to tell the time. Once I was upstairs, he fed me only bread and beans unless I did something to earn a reward. He only says, “Yes.”
“Did he physically abuse you?”
“Yes.”
“Did he sexually abuse you?”
Harry pauses, glancing at Ron with a conflicted feeling inside. It’s nothing I didn’t agree to. He knows it was wrong, it was coercive, and controlling, but it was also the only touch he received. It wasn’t always bad. For that, he will always feel ashamed. For that, he can never forgive himself. What would you think of me, Ron, if I told you I kissed his feet for a slice of cake? What would you think of me if I told you that I dreamed of him, every night, and some of those dreams were sexual?
Would you want to be my friend anymore, Ron?
“Let me clarify,” Gerkle continues, easily. “As a prisoner of his, any sexual contact you had together is, by law, abusive conduct. Did you have any sexual contact at all with Lord Voldemort?”
“Yeah.”
Ron’s fists are clenched forcefully by his sides and Hermione’s expression glazes over into cool disinterest. He knows they are going to talk about this later.
“Finally, do you have any information on any terrorist attacks planned by his organisation? Can you give me a list of names of “Death Eaters” that you have come into contact with and a brief explanation of the hierarchy of his enterprise?” Gerkle seems the most interested in this and Harry does his best to answer her myriad of questions with at least somewhat useful answers. Truthfully, Voldemort kept him locked away from all others except Luna and didn’t mention any plans to him, big or small. He has long since forgotten the faces of those who stood and laughed in the Forest of Dean when Voldemort made his golem and stunned him.
He offers Luna - Lovegood, think of her as Lovegood - up to Gerkle which the woman accepts easily. She has all three of them sign the transcript of their meeting and a few other documents that Harry doesn’t even read before signing.
Making conversation as she leads them out the door, Harry stops dead once he hears what she says. “I assume you’ll be staying with your father.”
“My father is dead.” What the fuck?
“Apologies, Mr. Potter. I meant your other father.” He blinks, dumbfounded. Gerkle sighs and shuffles back over to her desk and picks up a document. “It says right here that James Potter was your blood adopted father and that your biological father is one,” she flips it on the long edge, “Anthony Edward Stark. He’s a renowned American muggle.”
/
“What does this mean? Did my mum cheat on my dad?” Harry paces from wall to wall. It was one of his pastimes as a captive. He had little to do but rummage through his - Voldemort’s - dresses, make and unmake and remake the bed, and pace. “Why does this always happen to me? Why?”
“Harry, mate.” Ron is flicking through the channels of some muggle TV. Hermione had booked them a hotel room for the night. There’s three single beds. Harry hates that it makes him relax that there’s separate beds. “Harry, calm down. You’ve been through a lot, right? Maybe it’s a good idea to just sit down and have something to eat.” He gestures to a platter full of room service, hot cakes and bacon and all.
The sweet fatty smell makes him nauseous. It smells like a trick, like Voldemort is going to walk through the door and ask ‘what are you willing to do for it, my pet?’ “No, I’m good.”
Ron laughs sharply. “You’re good? That’s what you’re going with now… Okay, I know it’s been years and you’re obviously fucking traumatised. I just, can you sit down with me and watch Survivor and we’ll just take a moment to be alive? I’ve missed my best mate.”
‘What do I get for it?’ almost spills out of his lips. It takes an effort to keep it in.
Cagily, Harry sits on the farthest bed from Ron’s and watches as muggles stay on an island, eating rice and backstabbing each other, all on a television that has evolved to be sleeker and smoother since Harry was peeking at it through a slit in his cupboard under the stairs. Fuck, my life sucks. Just, so much.
He doesn’t relax. He doesn’t even think about sleeping. All he knows is that it’s over and he’s spent far too long under someone’s thumb to do it again. “Look, I can’t do this.” Harry laughs, high and shrill like he’s putting on a pink dress before he sees Neville for the last time. “Sit here and watch TV? What the fuck, Ron?”
Ron shuts it off. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know what to do with this. I’ve dreamed of finding you, like, every day for two years, Harry. I don’t know what to do from here.”
“Yeah… me neither.”
So it is that two grown ass men decide to wait for Hermione Granger to return to the hotel so that she can sort out what they’re supposed to do with their lives. She’d know, wouldn’t she?
“Hermione took it hard, too.” Ron says, when the silence grows too oppressive. “Thought you were dead. I never believed it. I couldn’t imagine it. Not Fred and you.”
“Fred?”
“Oh, shit, you didn’t know? Fred’s dead. He died at the Battle of Hogwarts. Who else? George topped himself last year. Neville’s been missing for years and is presumed dead. Tonks and Lupin, they died at the Battle of Hogwarts.” Ron lists off these tragedies, crushing the free floating pieces of Harry’s heart that hadn’t believed, hadn’t known, who, if anyone, was alive of his friends all these years.
“And Ginny?” It’s hard to say the name, hard to think of her. He’d been in love when he’d said goodbye to her in Sixth Year. Harry wishes he’d never left her, never bothered to try and defeat Voldemort. What good did it do? Sure, I killed him in the end, but look how many people I lost… And anything he once loved about Ginny has been tarnished by now. Voldemort made sure of that.
“Ginny’s good,” Ron says, tone lightening somewhat. “Still a firecracker. She’s training to be a MediWitch for the Order. My dad, he died a few months after the battle. My mum is still alive, though, and my other brothers. Percy joined the Death Eaters,” he admits, with a bottomless excruciating rage, “and Charlie fucked off back to where the dragons are. Bill has been back with Fleur and their baby girl, Anais.”
“And you and Hermione?” He asks, hopefully. He remembers they kissed right before he got taken. “Are you together now?”
“Um, no. Hermione has something to explain to you, I think,” Ron says, carefully. “Took me a bit to get my head around but, yeah. It’s up to,” he fumbles his words a little, “Hermione to explain it when the time is right. When you’re both ready.”
Harry grins, weakly. “Sounds like you’ve matured since I’ve been away.” Since I’ve been away, as if it was a vacation or a year studying abroad.
“I know it’s soon and it will take a while to adjust, but when, or I guess the better word is if you’re ready, then you can talk to me about it. ‘Mione too.” His blue eyes go steely with resolve. “I can only guess what nonsense he’s told you, what shit he has done to you, but I love you, no matter what. The Harry I know probably feels like crap for killing the Dursleys and I want you to know that I don’t think any differently of you, you’re still the guy who saved my sister from the Chamber of Secrets and the bloke who helped me take Padma to prom.”
“I’d have thought you’d hold it against me that I helped you with Padma,” Harry cracks a smile. “Seeing as that date crashed and burned since you only had eyes for Hermione the whole night.”
Ron guffaws and then play-acts as if he is going to throw the remote. He doesn’t do it and there’s a part of Harry that wonders whether that’s because he knows that Harry would go into some sort of base survival mode if he makes a sudden move.
Thank you, Lord Voldemort, for the curses you have left me with. You truly were and always will be remembered as a scourge on this Earth! Amen!
/
Chapter 3
Notes:
tw
negative thoughts around eating/food
learning about transphobic systems
Chapter Text
3.
When Hermione comes out to him, she- shit, they give him a book. They say that after Harry has read Gender Identity In The Wixen World from cover to cover, then Harry can come to talk to them. Until then, he stays with Ron in the muggle hotel, watching tv and dissociating into the background state that he’d sometimes fall into as Voldemort’s captive.
Now that he’s allowed - no, encouraged - to eat whatever he wants, to dress however he wishes, to leave the confines of a single room, Harry finds he can’t. No matter that he saw Voldemort’s eyes drain of life, he can’t believe he’s dead. We missed a horcrux, he thinks hysterically. He’s out there, gaining power, thinking up a punishment for me. As much as the thought scares him, he can’t bear to voice it. Doing so will only make it come true.
Ron stays by his side. He has his own fatigue clinging to him. Years on the run, living out of a battered old school trunk, dodging Snatchers and nightmares, is apparently no walk in the park either. Harry notices how Ron scoffs down his food in a manner even more desperate than when they were at Hogwarts. He’s hungry.
“Have you looked into, err, Tony Stark yet?” Ron asks during a CBS ad break. He’s been staring at the tv for hours, procrastinating his sleep just like Harry has. Best mates who have insomnia together stay together.
“Yeah. He’s some muggle billionaire.” Harry laughs, the idea still surreal. While he was growing up in a cupboard with his aunt complaining about how much she spent to feed him, his deadbeat dad, Tony Stark, was sipping diamond martinis and sleeping his way through Hollywood actresses. Or whatever rich people do.
“Billionaire?” Turning the tv onto mute, the red head cocks his head. “Like he has a billion pounds?”
“American dollars. USD. Pounds are the British muggle currency.”
“Still,” whistles Ron. “That is a lot of dolls.”
“Dollars.” Harry grins.
“Dollars, right, that’s what I said.” Sure. “But with that much money, you’d be even more well off than as a Potter?”
“I still am a Potter.” Harry glares, sitting up from his imprint in the hotel room's couch. “Just because my mum cheated doesn’t mean that my dad isn’t my dad. He raised me when I was a baby, didn’t he?”
“Shit, sorry. Yeah.” Ron scratches the back of his head. “I should know by now to spit words out correctly. Hermione rules with an iron fist about that shit.”
“Yeah,” he frowns. He doesn’t want to gossip about his other best friend but- “So what is that about? Is she, um, gay?” Gay shouldn’t be a dirty word, Harry knows that, but it still falls out of his mouth awkwardly.
“They,” Ron corrects, easily. “And no, or, well. Kind of? I can’t explain! Read the book, Harry.”
“You do realise Hermione has assigned me homework five seconds after escaping You Know Who?”
He nods sagely, eyes twinkling with mirth. “Gender is complicated stuff.”
“Why can’t they just explain it to me?”
“Something about emotional labour.” Ron turns the tv back up as Jeff Probst’s face appears on the screen. “Not their duty to explain their gender to everyone, over and over again, for the rest of their life, blah blah. Trust me, you’ll spend more time arguing about it than the time it would take to read it.”
Well, at least it will make for a good distraction. Harry cracks the book, wincing at how heavily it falls open in his lap.
/
“Ron, did you know ‘pink’ used to be a boys’ colour?”
“Yeah. Gender is pretty made up.”
“...”
“Just wait until you get to the bit about why we have gender-separate bathrooms, Harry.”
/
“Ron! This is so confusing. If sex and gender are different, then, then-”
“Then ‘how do you know what gender you are?’”
“I don’t want to be a girl, Ron!”
“Then don’t be, mate.”
/
“Wait, Tonk was a metamorphmagus, right?”
“Yeah.”
“It says here metamorphmagus used to be forced to fit one gender presentation or they’d be arrested on charges of fraud! Ron, this is so fucked up. The law only changed like, fifty years ago.”
“...You’re not going to like reading about the current laws.”
“Under You Know Who, you mean?”
“The ones from Fudge’s era.”
/
“Eighty percent.”
“I know.”
“ Eighty percent. ”
“Hermione is okay. They’re alive, they’re safe.”
“But did they ever want to?”
“Not my place to share, you know that, mate.”
“Christ.”
/
“Is it a feeling?”
“To feel like a boy or a girl?”
“Yeah.”
“I dunno. I think because I’m cis that I don’t really notice my gender. I don’t notice any, what’s the word, wrongness . I’m fine looking like a man, being male, all that shit.”
“I think I am too. Some of these descriptions, though… I feel like my body is a prison. I look in the mirror and hardly recognise myself. I wish I was someone else. I don’t feel real. ”
“That’s probably the trauma speaking, Harry.”
“Great, just what I needed, another voice in my head.”
/
“Did them being non binary make you fall out of love?”
“Shit! Hard hitting questions today.”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“Nah, whatever. What else should we do, cooped up in this hotel room? I guess, maybe. I just never saw myself with someone who wasn’t a girl and once they explained it to me, I couldn’t unsee it. I think I was putting up a version of Hermione that wasn’t really there. What about you? Would you ever date someone who isn’t, you know, a girl?”
“I honestly don’t see myself dating ever again after. All that.”
“You made it, though. You got out.”
“He took so much, Ron. Stuff I didn’t even know you could take from a person. How can someone come back from that? Is it even possible?”
“I think maybe you don’t go back to who you were before but you form into someone new, someone who has had those shitty experiences and processed them and is making do with their lot.”
“When did you get so emotionally intelligent?”
“Hey! I was never the one who trapped a woman in a jar to stop her from writing nasty articles.”
“Jesus, I forgot they did that.”
/
“You want to hear some of the shit we’ve been up to in the war?”
“As long as you know, I’m not going to share mine. It’s not a quid pro quo.”
“I’m not gonna force you to talk. Now listen, we’ve gone through a lot of stuff, but the craziest thing happened a few months after you got ‘nabbed…”
/
“So, are you going to track down your other dad?” Ron asks when it’s reaching around two AM and the television has defaulted to showing infomercials and reruns of old shows.
“My other dad?” Harry chokes on his popcorn.
“I mean,” Ron says defensively, “James was your dad, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, he’s just… another dad. The Other Dad.”
Harry watches a man spill a bucket of water on the floor and then put a cloth down on it to soak up all the water. Maybe it would make more sense with the sound on. Finally, he says, “I’m not sure.”
“Haven’t decided yet?”
“More like,” he fumbles for the words. “I’ve grown up my whole life without parents, that I can remember. The Dursleys were no sort of real family and I’m an adult now. It just feels like it’s too late.” I’m all grown up now. What would he even want with me?
“You don’t have to, like, go full-on family with him. You could just ask him about your mum and that.” Ron suggests. He digs his fingers deep into the popcorn bowl and takes a large creaky swallow of the buttery stuff. Harry has never really had a chance to have popcorn. It was never for him at the Dursleys, was too muggle of a thing for Hogwarts, and at Voldemort’s… Well, it’s best left unsaid.
It’s best left never thought about, he tells himself, trying to get that shaky escapist feeling to shut the fuck up and leave him alone.
“What would that even look like?” Harry laughs like there’s a dark ghost in his chest. “ Oh, hey Dad, I know we’ve never met but you got my mum up the duff twenty years ago and here I am! Oh, by the way, magic exists! He’s a muggle, isn’t he? Am I even allowed to tell him about magic?” It’s a massive part of who I am and what I’ve experienced.
His mate hums thoughtfully. “You’ll have to look up the MACUSA laws about it but I think since he’s family, you can share the truth of magic with him. Who knows, maybe he already knows?” Ron shrugs. “I dunno, when we get out of here and work out what Hermione has sorted for us, you can ask them what they know about him.”
Harry scoffs, “You think with everything going on she’ll have made up a research paper for me to read about him?”
Ron just gives him a look.
He crosses his arms over himself. “I know we joke about her- them being on top of everything, but it’s wartime. Hermione has better things to do than worry about Tony Stark.”
“You’re always going to be their top priority,” is what Ron says next, completely unaware of how it hits Harry in the solar plexus. “We should try to sleep, shouldn’t we?”
“We should,” agrees Harry grimly.
Ron switches the tv back on and leans back, laughing. “At some point, am I right, mate?”
“Let our tomorrow-selves live with it!”
/
Fuck. I should have gotten some sleep.
Hermione turns up to the doorstep at 9AM in the morning, banging on the door loudly. Ron shoots up out of his pile of blankets on the floor, wand in hand, eyes wide, and scuttles over to the door. Harry rolls out from under his bed and unbends his body from the foetal position. His clothes are sticky with butter grease and his stomach is already rumbling for breakfast.
No, he tells it. Bad things happen when he listens to his body. Bad things happen when he gives in.
“What did you say to me after you got out of McNair’s dungeon?” He calls through the door, firmly.
“Not least, he takes terrible care of his ancient artefacts.”
Ron unlocks the door, lowering his wand. He and Hermione embrace firmly whilst Harry looks over from his spot on the floor and wonders how he can summon the energy to greet them as well.
Hermione frowns, taking in Ron’s appearance for a moment before skipping over it politely. “Other people were there, Ron! You need a better question than that. How many times must I go over this with you?”
“At least once more, apparently,” Ron grins. He dips into the hotel’s minifridge and brings out a can of orange fizz.
“These are so expensive,” Hermione complains, “Thank you,” but dutifully takes the proffered drink and cracks it open with a pleasant hiss that reminds Harry of baking out in the summer sun in Privet Drive’s front yard. I got a can of fizz by collecting pounds that got lost in the couch. How weird that he looks back on that fondly when at the time, he felt so helpless and sunburnt. “So, I take it you and Harry got on well?”
Ron scratches his head, cheerfully, as if he’s gotten more than two hours of sleep last night. “We watched tv and he read the book you left him.”
“And what did you think, Harry?” Hermione says carefully, as if they’ve put a safety deposit box around their heart to stop them getting hurt. This means a lot to them, he realises, feeling like an utter tool.
“I think that I love you, I support you, and I see you. I think that the backwards laws around gender-diverse people are batshit crazy and I want to do whatever I can to help.”
Sighing as the weight lifts, Hermione smiles like a gentle sun. “I love you too, Harry. I’m sorry it took us so long to rescue you.”
I don’t want to talk about it. Standing up, brushing himself off and sniffing around for a clean shirt from Ron’s rapidly expanding pile of clothes from his open suitcase, Harry brushes them off. “It’s fine. Got there in the end, didn’t you? Here.” He picks up the book and hands it back, half wishing he’d never read what was inside, half wishing he’d never known just how rough the world was for people like his best mate.
But I need to know. I need to face the hard truths to be able to do anything.
It’s just a bit harder to conceptualise saving Hermione from the Ministry’s laws when they’re a nebulous and overreaching entity rather than a specific racist rapist fuckwit. Stop thinking about it. He can’t exactly ride in on a dragon and save the day that way.
“Oh! I have something for you too.” Hermione reaches into their bottomless bag that they still have after all this time. “It’s not much but I did some preliminary research on your biological father. Hope this helps.” And sure enough, they hand him a docket that contains around twenty pages of information on Tony Stark, the sperm donor of which Harry has brutally mixed feelings about even visiting.
Ron smirks like I told you so. Harry holds the papers like they’re a gate into an unknown future and listens as Hermione outlines the housing and services they’ve scrounged up for the three of them.
“It’s over,” they say. “We’ve done our part. We got you out, we defeated Him. We can go back to our lives now.”
“Back to Hogwarts?” Ron laughs, darkly.
Hermione gives Harry a quick and guilty look and he has a feeling there’s some terrible news they’ve yet to break to him. “No. Not Hogwarts, since it’s destroyed.”
/
What did Harry expect? Did he think that Voldemort would have preserved the only place that had felt like his home? Did he think that even though there was some damage at the Battle of Hogwarts, it would have been rebuilt into a place that he could return to? Kind of.
Well, it was naive. Hogwarts is no more and there’s a good chance it never will be anything again. For the short months that Voldemort ran it under his rule, its legacy was a dark torturous one riddled with blood supremacy and abuses of power. No one wants to rebuild it, not after what happened there.
It’s fine. He has Ron and Hermione. There’s more to life than Hogwarts, Harry! So just shut up and stop thinking about it. Stop feeling about it. You got out. That’s all you wanted. Why do you have to be such a complainer?
He doesn’t mean to but he retreats again. He lets himself be dragged along to the MACUSA provided temporary housing for British asylum seekers and drifts off into his thoughts. No more Hogwarts, it sounds unreal. No more Great Hall, no more Gryffindor Tower, no more kitchens, no paintings, no ghosts. Where did all the ghosts go? He almost expects to find them in the building with him, seeking their own asylum - a place to set up a new haunting ground.
The first place he’s ever belonged to has been turned to rubble. Millenia-old warding, thousands of years of history, architecture, and culture has been decimated in the span of a few months. It’s a damn shame. Not for the first time in his life and what won’t be the last, Harry thinks to himself, fuck you, Voldemort.
/
Chapter 4
Summary:
tw
depression, ptsd stuff, self harm & ed behaviours (referenced), self isolation, reference to suicide attempt, references to past traumatic events both canon and from earlier in this fic
Notes:
a/n: *crawls out into the sun*
hi. been a while.
Chapter Text
4.
The despicable thing about what Voldemort did to him was make him a participant.
In the beginning, there was only hopelessness. The hunger, the cold, the dark, the grime, the pain. It was animal. It was without power. Harry was the Boy Who Died. The worst part was being left alone with his own thoughts. Harry had no distractions from how he felt. Harry was not allowed to break enough to no longer feel. He was kept on the precipice of sanity for the sole purpose of drawing out his pain.
Harry feels envy for Neville Longbottom’s parents who still remain, alive and happy, in St. Mungo’s. Their pain lasted minutes. They no longer have to feel what has been stolen from them. Harry has not been back to visit but from what Hermione has told him, they are doing well. Alice has learnt how to make paper cranes and Frank has been humming the tune of Beethoven’s last symphony.
The world is healing. Harry is not.
Time heals, supposedly. Time takes your memories and dulls them. Time makes you stupid. Time makes you forget all of those precious survival instincts that have kept you going.
The despicable thing is that Harry is still afraid of the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. Harry still sees Cedric’s white empty eyes staring uselessly into space. Harry still feels the wretched grief of Sirius falling through the Veil. Harry isn’t healing. Harry isn’t ageing. Harry is seven years old, wondering if Aunt Petunia will let him stay up to watch the New Years fireworks on TV rather than lock him away under the stairs like the old vacuum cleaner.
Voldemort has taken many things from him. Most things, if he’s honest. He’s taken his parents, some of his friends, his childhood, his virginity, his naivety, and his hope. The one thing Harry doesn’t let him have is his pain.
Harry takes that. And he makes it his.
/
Hermione and Ron let him get away with wallowing for the first year after Voldemort. Hermione locks him away in a German safehouse under five layers of warding and lets Harry lie in his room with the curtains drawn for three months. Ron joins him, licking his own wounds. Hermione visits weekly with updates on the trials. They don’t ask Harry to speak at any trials. We have everything covered, they say, warmly. Harry is permitted this solitude. Harry has given his life for the wizarding world. It’s time you got some rest, Harry.
Then the itch starts. Ron goes for daily walks. He calls his parents on the Floo. He writes romantic letters to Lavender who is a werewolf now.
Harry is too tired to feel a certain way about that. It’s too much to ask him to feel grateful for having one thing left undisturbed; his humanity.
Ron starts mentioning Auror training. He visits England more often. He asks Harry if he can invite the Weasleys over for dinner. Harry says no. Ron asks again. Harry says no eight times until he gives in and then Mrs. Weasley shoves him and Ginny into a room together and Harry has a panic attack.
Ron doesn’t press the issue after that. He still visits but he leaves Harry in the safehouse with his books. Harry’s never been so grateful for something to read.
Harry should be grateful that the Weasleys are moving on. Ginny is flying for the Holyhead Harpies, Bill has taken over the Wheezes in Diagon Alley, Charlie is still in Romania, and Ron’s mother is alive and kicking.
Percy and Lovegood are in Azkaban awaiting sentencing. Harry doesn’t visit. He tries not to think about the weeks when seeing Lovegood was his only joy. She was a pawn and was once his friend. She gave herself up for freedom. Harry thinks he and her aren’t so different, even if Ron won’t let him say so.
Resentfully, Ron speaks about how his mother is spending all of their savings on getting Percy a good lawyer. It doesn’t matter to them that he jumped ship and became the enemy. She say she can’t lose another son, not after the twins. Ron lets her have it but Harry has a feeling that he’s never going to forgive him.
It takes six months and a pitcher of Dreamless Sleep for Hermione to hold an intervention. They strongarm Harry into a mind healer’s office and don’t let him leave until he starts to speak. He can’t remember what he says, that’s how badly he dissociated. Hermione apologises afterwards. It’s a process, they say, voice tight with teary frustration. I know it’s a process. It will take time. Your time. I know I can’t force you. I just worry, Harry. You know I do.
From then on, Ron looks after his doses of Dreamless Sleep and Harry is on suicide watch for three months until he’s allowed to piss unattended. He cheers up slightly when he learns that Ron has been accepted into the Auror program, if only because it means he’ll be around less to spy on him.
Harry starts holding his breath in the bath until his vision greys around the time that Hermione passes their replacement NEWTs. He jokingly asks them to obliviate the past few years from his mind and Hermione grimly says that they’d looked into it. No luck, apparently. To get rid of that many memories would leave Harry braindead.
He doesn’t ask them to do it anyway. He knows that would make Hermione break their promise to not intervene.
The onions in Harry’s vegetable patch are fully grown by the time that Ron stages his first intervention. He’s been good about leaving that stuff to Hermione and simply enjoying his time with Harry. The change is that Ron’s moving out and Harry will be left alone. The change is that Harry doesn’t see this as a problem even though he’s taken to setting alarms for himself every thirty minutes so that he doesn’t fall into dreams.
One day, Harry thinks about writing a letter to Dudley before realising that he’s dead. He’d forgotten. His relatives were dead because of a decision Harry made. He’s been cleared of all crimes due to his status as a prisoner but that doesn’t do anything to wash the taste of ash from his mouth. That is around the time that Harry starts throwing up half of his meals. He gets away with it for six months before Hermione brings up their latest ultimatum.
“Your father, Tony Stark,” they say, dropping a giant manila folder onto Harry’s kitchen island. He’s reaping the harvest of a few other vegetables and has been cooking a lot of stew lately. It tastes alright, even when coming up. “It’s time to visit him.”
“That didn’t sound like a question,” Harry says, bemused. He opens the folder and stares at the greying middle-aged socialite that stares back at him. “Aren’t you supposed to let me work these things out by myself?”
“I’ve come to a realisation,” Hermione says, in that voice that only ever means trouble for him. “I’ve realised you’re a stubborn bastard, Harry Potter.”
“You’ve only just realised that now?” Ron guffaws exaggeratedly. He’s applying some bruise salves to some of his training injuries. He’s doing well in the Ministry, apparently, despite the derision he’d had for it growing up. It seems like when it’s not his dad doing it, it’s not as lame.
“I thought you were supposed to be observant, ‘Mione,” Harry offers. He closes the folder. His breathing comes easily, nowadays. He can’t forget but he can control the pain. That makes it easier. The endorphins, the addiction, the relief, the obsession. It fills his mind. It distracts him. It would seem like he’s getting better if it weren’t for how incredibly fucked up everything has gotten. “Don’t worry, I won’t let on with the Ministry that you’re losing your edge.”
“You’d have to leave the house to let them know that, Harry.” Hermione is not amused. “Other than us, you haven’t seen anyone for what, a year? A year and a quarter?”
“Don’t start throwing fractions at the poor lad,” Ron complains, in the background.
“I don’t have to leave the house for that, actually.” Harry smirks. “I can send owls from this very spot, can’t I? I may not be a fixture but the Man Who Lives still has some weight to him, doesn’t he?”
Primly, they say, “If you could, then why don’t you? I don’t see any owls.” They look around demonstrably. Harry hasn’t had an owl since Hedwig died. Ron’s new tawny owl is at the Weasleys because Harry can’t stand the sight of her.
Harry exhales tightly. He closes his eyes. He can feel one coming on - a memory. Her dying. Her beautiful white plumage spoiled with red. The broom between his legs, the green streaky light in the sky like lightning, how Voldemort floated like a great celestial evil.
He’s dead, Harry. He’s dead.
Harry grips the counter top, feels the sharp edge dig into him. Am I, pet? He can hear his voice. Sibilant and smooth. “It’s not real,” he says, desperately. “Please.”
“‘Mione, he’s having one.”
“You’re not real.” He bites at his lip savagely. Anything to feel something other than fear. Anything to be someone and not something.
“On it.”
A vial is pressed to his lips. Cold glass. Smooth. Harry accepts it easily. He is at the mercy of these hands. He drinks and is brought back down to earth. Harry shudders when he opens his eyes.
“You need to get out of the house,” Hermione repeats, for the nth time since they’ve reunited. “It’s not good for you here, Harry. It’s not good to be alone all the time.”
“If I leave, it’ll get worse,” he promises, raspily. “And why do you think that Anthony Stark is the one who will fix anything?”
“I’ve looked into him,” they say, steadily. Ron puts a hand on Harry’s shoulder and squeezes. It is both there and not there. Harry hopes this isn’t a dream. Harry hopes like hell that he’s not about to wake up in a four poster bed with a dress on. Hermione looks him in the eye. “You need someone to look after you. He’s Iron Man. I think he can do it.”
Harry swallows thickly. “I won’t do it. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
/
Three months later, Harry is standing in the lobby of Stark Industries wearing the same grey sweats he’s been wearing for three days. He hasn’t showered or shaved or bothered to make himself look presentable. If he’s lucky, the receptionist will turn him away and Harry can say he tried. Harry can tell Hermione that they were wrong, that Stark is a flake and a philanderer and a collection of vices. Then they will go looking for their next big fix and Harry will have a few more weeks or months left to his own self destructive devices.
A path to hell paved with emancipatory intentions.
To Harry’s glee, the receptionist takes one look at him and sneers. “Yes?”
“Hi, I’m Tony Stark’s biological son.” He smiles flatly, glancing at the security guards who are edging closer to him. “Illegitimate, of course.”
“Really.” The receptionist gives a very unimpressed sigh. “Well, fill this out then.” Instead of shooing him away, she passes over a docket of small-print forms. “Do you intend to sue for paternity?”
“No,” he says, holding the forms numbly.
“Alright, then. Next!”
Harry stumbles back to the chairs in the lobby and uses a counter pen to sketch out his details. The forms take approximately three hours because Harry keeps zoning out and then flinching due to the overwhelming amount of people in this lobby, many of whom give him curled-lipped and censorious mutterings. After he’s filled it out to the best of his ability, he hands it back to the receptionist who scans it dubiously.
“You didn’t put your address,” she says.
“I don’t have one,” Harry lies. He’s not going to give Stark a way to find him, not that he’d be able to due to the muggle-repellant wards. “I’m homeless.”
“Hmmph.” It is only because of how much it would insult the woman herself that Harry finds himself comparing the receptionist’s temperament to Umbridge. He doesn’t let himself wonder where she is now and if she’s managed to squeeze her way out of any charges. Harry knows Hermione will handle that stuff. “You also didn’t list a phone number.”
“Don’t have one.”
Her eye twitches, minutely. “Right.” With a long-suffering sigh, she points to the wall of couches that Harry has just emerged from. “Because of that, the protocol will be different. Please wait while I organise it.”
“Sure.” Harry hums, feeling a thousand miles away all of a sudden, and sits down to zone out on the couch for a bit. He’s imagining what he might bake in celebration for this when he gets home. There’s nothing like an I Told You So cake to make Hermione bristle. He takes a moment to dismiss the possibility of not being a sore loser. Harry feels he’s earned the right.
The receptionist alternates between being on hold with various levels of Stark Industries and dealing with visitors in the lobby. The security guards switch out and Harry takes a nap on the couch. No one offers him any refreshments and he likes the excuse not to eat. Hermione had reluctantly relented at his insistence at doing this alone. They’re not here to nag him and Ron is off putting Lucius Malfoy back in prison. There’d been a major prison break last week. Harry thinks that’s the sort of thing he would have cared more about before.
He forgets to set an alarm. He dreams of silk sheets, Dudley’s terrified eyes, and that split second in the First Task when Harry had almost fallen off his broom into the waiting jaws of a Hungarian Horntail.
“Bad dream?” He jolts up at Tony Stark’s suave voice. Harry may have avoided humanity like the plague but he’s still been watching the news. Last week, Stark and his goons took down an army of killer robots called Ultron. Sure, he apparently caused the problem but Harry appreciates the wherewithal and conscience it takes to amend it. It’s more than Harry has. “Dreaming about the consequences of your petty crimes? I’m a pretty chill guy but your insistence in this charade woke me up from my booze cruise.”
“You were on a cruise?” Harry’s brain says, still fumbling with consciousness.
“If you count the miniature replica of the Titanic in my living room, then yes.” His breath does smell of some sort of hard liquor but he’s not slurring his words or acting drunk. Stark must have a high tolerance. It doesn’t settle Harry’s nerves. He’d prefer if the man were off-kilter for this interaction.
“So?” Stark taps his foot impatiently as Harry pulls himself into a slouch, looking up at the man who made him. “Care to explain, Harry Potter?”
“How do you know my name?” Paranoia leaps in his throat. Is it one of Voldemort’s leftover men? Has this been a long-winded plot? Is this his new prison?
“Your papers, dummy.” Stark rolls his eyes. “You wrote your name though I’m a little dumbfounded why you used your real one, considering your reaction. What, are you just off a bender? I promise you this isn’t the smart play you think it is.”
Harry just shrugs.
“That’s it?” Stark laughs in a completely baffled way. “You claim to be my spawn and wait in my lobby for eight hours only to shrug? ”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Harry says, plainly. “My friend said I should contact you. I was planning on keeping it to myself.”
Stark’s lip quirks in amusement. “Is this reverse psychology? I won’t believe you just because you play it cool and unyielding. I’m not that desperate for people’s attention.” At Harry’s silence, the man immediately delegitimizes his own point. “Well? What do you want? Money? I can give you money if you need it. I’m not hard-up and I can recognise a fellow nihilist who has fallen prey to the pitfalls of modernity. Capitalism, right? Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Or be born into the ruling class. Whatever fits.”
Harry just sighs, tiredly. “Do you want me to leave, then?”
Stark boggles. “What, no genetic test? You’re just giving up the goat immediately? At least try to fake the test. I always enjoy that part.”
“If I was your son,” Harry says, shrewdly, “would it even make a difference? I know you didn’t sign up for this.”
“You’re not my son.” He rolls his eyes. “Obviously. So that is a useless hypothetical. I may have been interested in the human form in my youth but I wasn’t stupid. I always wrapped it up, kid. There’s no mini-me’s walking around.”
“Evidently, you didn’t. Because I exist.”
“Okay. Yeah, no. I was going to let you leave but, nah. You’re going to do the whole shebang, couch boy. Blood test and all. Come on, up, get up.”
Harry’s heart kind of stopped when Stark said let you leave as if he had the power to keep him. He forces each muscle to relax, telling himself that Stark may be Iron Man but that he’s still a muggle. It makes sense that he’d underestimate Harry. It doesn’t mean Harry is really in danger.
That doesn’t stop the terrible thought that this might be it. That his stretch of freedom has run its course and Harry has simply moved hands.
He blinks, twice. Shakily, he gets to his feet. His legs aren’t quite following instructions. Come on. Clearing his throat, Harry says, “I’d rather stay here.” It’s open in the lobby. Public. He can’t be taken without witnesses. The receptionist will remember him. Hermione will find him. They know exactly where he’s gone this morning.
“Seriously? Oh my god, for someone trying to play the lost son, you’d think you’d act more pleased to see me. Whatever. JARVIS! Get me the testing kit!” Stark calls out a word that Harry doesn’t recognise and an artificial voice sounds through the lobby, causing many passersby to turn to look at them. Stark frowns. “Nothing to see here, folks. Just Tony Stark getting one up on a con artist. You know how it is.” Miraculously, the passersby continue on with their tasks. Stark Industries must be such a wild place that this doesn’t even phase them.
All the more reason to move here, Harry thinks, wryly. Great plan, Hermione.
Harry sits back down, causing Stark to let out another surprised laugh, and focuses on everything red in the room. He might have succeeded in avoiding therapy but Ron’s grounding techniques are a necessary evil. He’d rather be in psychic pain than in that drifty helpless state that dissociation brings him. Anyone could do anything to him like that.
The elevator across the lobby dings and none other than Pepper Potts herself strides towards them, holding a small white box that fits neatly in her hands. “Really, Tony? I was in the middle of a meeting, you know? How does this constitute a family emergency?”
“Pep, meet family.” Stark gestures to Harry, grinning cheekily. “My illegitimate son.”
She sighs. “Tony.”
“Seriously!” He waves his arms about emphatically. Harry notes the smudges of engine grease on his fingers. Tony Stark builds robots, doesn’t he? That might be fun to learn about. “He claims that he’s mine!”
Don’t hope. Harry reminds himself. It’s an old lesson now. What started as they aren’t coming for you has changed to you can’t trust that good things will happen. It’s best not to hope. Less painful that way.
Pepper Potts shoves the kit into Stark’s arms and strides back to the still open elevator, her six-inch heels clicking definitively against the linoleum. Stark just whistles. “Now, there’s a woman, kid. If you get one like that, never let her go. Not like I did.”
Harry tenses when Stark turns to him with the bright manic energy of an inventor. He shoves the swab into Harry’s mouth before he can blink. “Come on, this is the test. Well, the first test. Sit still. Honestly, if you are my son, we really need to have a conversation about the hobo aesthetic you have going on. The cologne is overkill. At least, I hope that’s cologne.”
Ten minutes pass and Stark stares at the swab with an inscrutable expression. He frowns. “Must be a dud.” He goes through three mouth swabs before he brings out the syringe.
Harry pales. “N-no.”
Stark, seeing how still he is, at least has the mercy not to just stab him with it. “Why’s that? Blood tests are best. Well, other than the scanner.”
“Scanner.” Harry says, teeth gritted. They can’t have his blood. Nothing good happens when people take Harry’s blood.
Stark shrugs, putting the needle away. “If you’re sure. I don’t think whatever you’ve done will be enough to fool the scanner. It’s like, lightyears away from any other technology on Earth.” He whistles when Harry stands again, forcing himself into the glass elevator. “You’re really confident about this, aren’t you, kid? You either believe this or you’ve done something irrefutable.”
“I believe it.” Harry says, still calming down from that first moment of seeing the syringe. It’s not as confronting as a knife or a graveyard or that silver of Wormtail’s replaced hand. It’s still confronting. You can’t have my blood.
Two days later, Tony Stark relents to the truth that Harry Potter is his blood.
“If this turns out to be fake,” he says, with a tight smile, “then you’re going to regret it. This is your one chance to tell me, okay? Tell me now. Are you my son?”
Harry considers it for a long moment. He could refute it. Stark might not believe him but he could plant the seed of doubt. It’s not what Hermione wants but it would ensure his freedom.
On the other hand, Harry Potter isn’t a liar. Voldemort made him into a lot of things but never that.
“I am, yeah.”
/
Chapter 5
Notes:
a/n: I DID IT! I finished it!! ends on a hopeful note and hopefully not too OOC for tony. a real mix and match of avengers lore, I'll be honest, but I hope this final chapter satisfies. this is dedicated to my existential dread :3
cw: ed stuff, references to abuse that already happened in this fic, implied drug/alcohol abuse, abusive howard
a/n2: sorry about the discontinuity that was originally in this chapter, should be fixed now
Chapter Text
5.
There is something very wrong with Harry Potter, who happens to be his son.
Those two things may or may not be related.
“Play something like Van Halen, JARVIS.” Tony complains, neck-deep in the latest Mark of his suit.
Like a bugged piece of code, Tony can spot the errors and the inconsistencies. It’s in the way Harry visits the bathroom after every meal. It’s how he calls Tony Dad when he’s with him and Mr. Stark when he talks to his friends over the phone - acting like he’s never used a mobile phone before in his entire life. It’s how Harry Potter doesn’t exist after 1991 in the UK records.
And yes, Tony knows that snooping is the lowest form of flattery, but there is little he can do when Harry won’t communicate about anything deeper than the weather.
“Of course, sir,” JARVIS says, helpfully playing the loudest heavy rock song he can find.
It’s not even on purpose - his brain is just hardwired for pattern recognition.
It goes against the social contract to butt his nose in when Harry is so clearly against it but Tony doesn’t abide by contracts very well. He has lawyers to take care of that for him.
Now, Harry doesn’t make it obvious. He wouldn’t be a proper Stark if he were blatant in his self-destruction. He’s cautious and he’s a sneaky son of a bitch but he does self-destruct, like all of them do.
Tony drank, Maria took little white pills, and Howard hit.
Harry starves.
There is something remarkably hopeless in the way that Tony can only observe as Harry pokes at the pizza on his plate, lying with his smiles and showing off Lily’s once bright coy green eyes - now sullen and dark. There is a selfish relapsing part of Tony who wishes he’d never found out about his lost son.
There is a bigger part, who claims to be Iron Man, that thinks that Harry is the best thing to have ever happened to him.
It is for this reason that Tony decides he is going to find what is wrong with his son and extinguish its influence. Whether he needs to invent a solution or raze an entire country, he’ll do it.
/
When Harry leaves Stark Tower in order to sulk about at home - and yes, Tony checked, drones are coming in extremely handy in spying on his son - he takes the StarkJet to England. Stopping in Heathrow, bluffing to Pepper that he has investors to meet with, Tony Stark knocks on the door of Number 4 Privet Drive and meets remnants of the extremely unpleasant Dursley family. Although the family themselves have all mysteriously disappeared - add another counter for the suspicious column - their house has been left alone and not sold on. The letters, emails, and nasty diary entries of Petunia Dursley tell him all he needs to know.
It’s a wonder that Petunia Dursley spawned from the same womb that created the bright and mischievous Lily Potter that caught his attention for those weeks during what seems like a lifetime ago. Of course, the experience wouldn’t have been complete without James’ heady oversight.
-and tell that freak to keep his promise! I don’t want to hear about him ever again! The letter crumples in his hands. He stops to think.
A few words of her tirade stand out to him: freak, devilspawn, and ‘they’. A grand mysterious ‘they’ never fails to tickle Tony’s intrigue.
Tony can’t help it. Patterns stand out to him.
He’s heard about a mysterious ‘they’ before.
/
It takes 46.3 hours for JARVIS to hack into SHIELD’s database. Frankly, it’s embarrassing, but considering that Tony was an integral part of the software’s updating team - with the express instruction to make it ‘Starkproof’ - he counts it as a win.
Phil Coulson is far too pink in the cheeks for a dead man. “Ah, Stark, nice to see you again!”
“Phil,” Tony grins. “You have no idea what Nat is going to do to you when she hears about this.”
“Except she won’t hear about anything, will she?”
Tony waggles his eyebrows. It takes considerably less time to hack into Phil Coulson and learn about the whereabouts of his wayward offspring. The extra funding for drones is just the icing on the cake.
/
Harry sits on the couch, picking at his five-star Chinese takeout. So far, Tony has discovered that Harry hates Thai food, is indifferent to fish and chips, and possibly loves Chinese leftovers so much that he can barely stomach it.
He’s a complicated boy. It’s too bad that Tony’s old ‘brain-wave reader’ MIT project was a load of hooey. It would have really helped to know what Harry was thinking.
“I was thinking you could meet some of your, ah, extended family, kiddo.” Tony says, aiming for casualness as he swirls a glass of biomechanically engineered non-alcoholic whiskey in his glass. It smells right, it tastes like whiskey, and unfortunately, it can’t get you buzzed.
“I thought they were all dead?” Harry asks, politely skeptical.
“Not that kind of family.” Tony cringes out a smile. “Some colleagues of mine are hoping to meet you and I’ve only been able to put them off for so long.”
“These wouldn’t happen to be the Revengers, would it?”
“Avengers,” Tony corrects, absently. “And maybe, maybe not. If it was, would you want to meet them?”
“Not really,” Harry says.
“Then let’s say it’s not them.”
/
Harry takes to the Avengers like a brick to water. That is to say, instead of introducing themselves to him one-by-one like they promised, Clint decides to throw his borderline-agoraphobic definitely-peoplephobic son a surprise Welcome To The Family party.
With spidery elegance, Nat stands in the sidelines, observing as Clint, Sam, and Thor set off tens of party poppers. Steve and Pepper awkwardly shout, “Surprise!” while Tony fails to get them all to stop.
Harry’s first instinct upon entering the room is to freeze, give Tony the middle finger, and then flee.
“Well, that could have gone better,” Bruce says, dryly.
In other news, it is nice to know that in a sink or swim scenario, Harry is the sort to put his own mask on first. Either that or he really dislikes Tony.
Hating his father may also be a genetic trait.
/
“Wizards?” Tony blinks, certain that his monitor must be deceiving him.
“Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, sir,” JARVIS confirms, steadily. “After trawling through all SHIELDRA databases, past, present, and predictive, I have observed a 99.89% certainty that there is an international underground magical society of which your son is a significant part of. He is a wizarding celebrity, renowned for his defeat of one ‘The Dark Lord Voldemort’.”
“Wizards, okay.” Tony furrows his brow for a moment. “I can work with that. Yeah, this is manageable.”
“Would you like me to send an order for more biosynthesised non-alcoholic whiskey?” JARVIS asks.
“That would be great, bud.” Tony rubs at his temples.
/
“Oh, I’m vegan!” Harry announces, when Tony tries to get him to have a proper dinner together so that he can somehow break the news that he knows about his son’s career as a wizard. It seems like the sort of thing you should tell people.
Fuck, Tony wished his mom was around to help him strategise about this.
After ordering a variety of vegan foods, he claims, “And celiac.”
Tony manages to find the most gluten-free vegan foods on the planet when Harry declares, “And I’m allergic to that.”
After doing a full-body scan of his son and knowing that the only thing Harry is allergic to is shellfish, Tony asks, curiously, “And what is ‘that’?”
“That.” Harry points vaguely at his dinner. “I also ate at home, already.”
Ignoring the pang that Harry’s continued insistence of living away from Stark Tower - despite the fact that he is in his early 20s and Tony should be glad he doesn’t have a leech for a son - Tony says, cheerfully, “You wouldn’t happen to be avoiding this dinner, would you, Harry?”
“‘Course not, Dad.” Harry smiles widely. “Would I do that?”
Weakly, he asks, “You won’t try even if I order some pumpkin juice?”
Harry falters, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. “What did you say?” He stands, hands bunched at his sides, far too lean and far too haunted, a shadow in Tony’s home.
“Look, I know about Hogwarts,” is not a sentence that Tony thought would set off Harry’s panic attack. Neither did he think Harry would barricade himself in the bathroom and do something called ‘disapparation’.
He disappears from the face of the earth. Tony knows that Harry has given him a clear signal that he needs space.
But he won’t lose his son twice.
/
MACUSA is not the most welcoming of places for a ‘No-Maj’. Tony takes three obliviates before the wizards there realize that he is a man too stubborn to Men In Black mind-wipe. That, and he has an AI who is perfectly willing to remind him about the existence of wizards ad infinitum.
“Mr. Stark, you must understand that this is extremely unconventional,” says some suit called Fockwick Merryweather from the No-Maj Matters division who isn’t actually wearing a suit but still reeks of bureaucracy. “It is simply unheard of for No-Majs to enter MACUSA! Our worlds are separate for a reason!”
“Look, I’m gonna cut to the chase.” Tony grits his teeth. “I don’t especially care about your magical racism right now-”
“Hey! We’re not-”
“I. Don’t. Care.” Tony glares. “Maybe I should but I don’t. I’m sure I’ll find a time to deal with your lot later - and work out how to integrate this so-called ‘magic’ into Starktech, but for now I have one desire, capiche? To find my fucking son.”
“And who might that be?”
“Harry Potter.” Tony grins as Fockwick’s jaw drops. “Ah, yes, you’ve heard of him?”
/
Unsurprisingly, magic or not, bribery goes a long way, despite the ridiculous exchange rate of dollars to dragots. It takes less than a day for Tony to find Harry’s records in MACUSA’s system.
It takes a week for Tony to read through them.
Gerkle: As a captive of Lord Voldemort, would you describe him as violent, abusive, and/or coercive?
Potter: Yes.
Not Harry’s testimony, that only takes twenty minutes to stomach.
Gerkle: Did he ever deprive you of meals as a method of control?
Potter: Yes.
No, what takes the longest is dredging up everything he can about this Voldemort sicko and coming to a certain conclusion that he is truly dead this time.
Gerkle: Did he physically abuse you?
Potter: Yes.
He looks through the school reports from Harry’s time at Hogwarts. Once he gets over the culture shock of the Troll to Outstanding system of measurement, he finds a few people to take issue with.
Gerkle : Did he sexually abuse you?
That pause in the transcript. The ink blotting from the dictation quill that shows the dead silence. Tony tells himself the bees buzzing in his stomach are from the annoyance at such archaic technology.
Gerkle: Let me clarify. As a prisoner of his, any sexual contact you had together is, by law, abusive conduct. Did you have any sexual contact at all with Lord Voldemort?
Maybe it’s okay that Harry takes some time for himself to hide away and recuperate. Tony has his own shit to sort through.
Potter: Yeah.
Tony has a son to avenge. He’s an Avenger, after all. It’s kind of his job.
(At least, that’s what he’ll tell Pepper if she asks why he’s missed another week of meetings.)
/
“Hi, sorry to bother you, are you Severus Snape?” This time Tony really does need to double check as apart from the surreality of tracking down a portrait of all things, there hasn’t been a photo of Severus Snape since the man was ten years old.
“Yes?” Snape drawls, painted to be sat on a decadent armchair in the headmaster’s office at Hogwarts - which is yet to be rebuilt due to some sort of wizarding superstition. Tony has had to bribe an incredible amount of ministry officials to get here unsupervised, into the Hall of Portraits in the Ministry of Magic. To his quiet surprise, Britain’s magical ministry is markedly more corrupt than MACUSA.
“Did you give my son a Troll for every essay that he has ever turned in?”
Snape’s eyes light up with cruelty. “Indeed, I may have, Mr…?”
“Mr. Nunya B.” Tony bears his teeth. “Did you also happen to, say, hand over a magical prophecy that led to the death of Lily Evans?”
That light is snuffed out as fast as death. Rage quickly displaces it, Snape’s acrylic lips pulling back in a snarl, “How dare you-?”
Tony grimaces and upturns an entire bottle of paint-thinner over Snape’s portrait, watching as it hisses and steams and Snape disappears from every plane of existence. Tony calls out, “All done, minister!”
The portly lady tottles into the room, doing pale with dread at the sight of not one but two of the headmaster portraits being ruined. “What did you do, you insipid muggle? Severus Snape, decorated war hero? Albus Dumbledore, savior of the wizarding world? Why would you-?”
“Let’s just say no one messes with the Starks, okay?” Tony whistles, donning his armor helmet and shooting out through the ceiling of the building before any headstrong curses might find him. “Pass that message on, Minister Scrooge!”
/
“Are you Luna Lovegood?” Tony says, sitting outside of the blonde woman’s cell. Her hair is ethereal and platinum blonde. The irises of her eyes are a gray-sea blue like the sickly shores of Azkaban.
It is incredibly cold here. Rotten, too. But Tony has a mission that he will not fail.
“You know who I am,” Lovegood says, voice echoing through her cell.
The ministry workers told him that the dementors had the ability to pull out a person’s soul. Tony had scoffed but now he finds himself brittle and worried that he will lose something of himself that he never thought to protect.
Lovegood isn’t as affected as she should be.
“How could you?” Tony seethes at her, furious that she is comfortable here in this palace of misery. Too insane to be bothered by it, most likely. “How could you betray him? How could you let that monster touch him?”
“I am not your enemy,” Lovegood sighs, mournfully. “I made a wrong choice, yes, but I have never hurt Harry.”
He swallows. “How did you know I was talking about Harry?”
“He is all they ever talk about.” She smiles, sadly. “Go to him, sir. I am not your calling, am I?”
Tony leaves Lovegood alone and he does not punish her. He can never quite put a finger on why.
/
“I’m going to come in, kid.” Tony says, standing outside of the seventh bedroom at the Burrow. The decimated troop of redheads, still with the spirit of a lived in house, watch him beadily as he knocks on Harry’s door one last time.
Harry’s room is a mess. There is a noxious smell coming from underneath the bed, piles of empty glass vials, and a squashed looking gray-golem in a red wig sitting on the inner ledge of the window sill.
That is nothing to speak of the mess of the man himself.
“What are you doing here?” Harry says, tiredly. He’s lying in bed with the covers wrapped around him tightly. Tony wants to shy away from how sick he looks. It’s not death’s door, not yet, but Harry certainly seems like he doesn’t want to wake up anymore.
“I’m here to help you, kid.”
Harry laughs, bitter and cracked and shattered like glass. “Oh really, Dad? You’ll help me?” He screams into his pillow and then lifts his head. “I don’t think people like me can heal. I think something inside me is, is,” he waves a hand. “It’s set wrong, like a broken bone. I can’t cope anymore. I can’t sleep. ”
“Hear this, alright, even if you don’t listen to another word I say.” Tony kneels by Harry’s bedside and makes a solemn oath. It may not be magically binding but he figures it’s just as good. It’s a Stark promise, the type that is impossible to break. “Even if I have to regrow you a whole new brain or blow up the entire world of warlocks, I’m going to fix this, okay? Maybe you don’t believe it now but you can tell I’m genuine, can’t you?”
“Yeah,” Harry snorts. “Genuinely insane.”
Tony grins. “We Starks have a nose like a bloodhound for lies. It might take us a while but we always learn the truth in the end.” He repeats himself, “I’m going to fix this. Maybe we travel back in time, maybe we kick Voldemort in the balls, maybe we discover the cure for PTSD. Whatever it is, whatever it takes, we’ll get there.”
“We?” Something dead comes back to life in his boy. It’s a damned near miracle.
“Yeah, we.”
Fin.
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mouse (Guest) on Chapter 4 Thu 13 Jun 2024 05:22AM UTC
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MagnusOpum on Chapter 4 Thu 13 Jun 2024 09:42AM UTC
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