“-. .-“

Harry wanted to be furious on behalf of his former self, he’d killed someone in self-defense at age 11 and nobody ever even asked if it had completely messed him up?

But it didn’t, Harry also recalled, and he didn’t feel the same disbelief even though he thought he should. He really thought he should. I wasn’t messed up. I wasn’t torn up over it at all. I didn’t buy it when the headmaster told me Quirrel was ‘already dead’ or doomed, or whatever malarkey he spun. I’d killed a man and I knew it. But I… didn’t feel bad about it?

Didn’t feel good about it either. It was just something that happened. He did feel a great relief that the mystery and danger were over, and a bit sad that a man he’d never met had lost his eternal life because Harry wasn’t good enough to stop Quirrel without putting the Philosopher’s Stone in danger. But for having survived when his mortal enemy didn’t…

Harry didn’t feel guilty about it at all.

The mixture of incredulity and indignance enabled Harry to beat back some of the persistent fear that the bartender had put in him. He went back to sleep, and after achieving the lucid state, he went and finally lived out his first life as Harry Potter properly.

A lot of it was still spotty, a bunch of years he didn’t relive at all because of his lack of frame of reference for those experiences in this life. He literally didn’t remember anything after the Battle of Hogwarts to the day his youngest kid started Hogwarts, except for a few holidays. Like the one that taught him the patronus charm. But he remembered everything up to the final battle fine.

Except kissing Cho Chang. Or Ginny Weasley. He hadn’t kissed a girl yet, in this life. Which was good because if he had, he might’ve gotten to remember more of –

Well, that.

Waking up the next morning, Harry thought blankly that his conclusions of the prior day had been true.

He’d never felt guilty for taking down his enemies, mortally or not. Not over Quirrel, or any Death Eater later, and certainly not when Voldemort finally died. No, it didn’t count as suicide for him either. Just because Harry was too weak to defeat his enemy properly and had to resort to killing him through a trap, one he didn’t even set up himself, didn’t make it any less killing. Harry had known what was going on the whole time. Even indulged an awkward victor’s monologue at the end about it.

The duels, fights, taking down his enemies… it only ever felt good. Euphoric, even. If he ever felt bad about something, it was losing allies and friends. His sadness and grief seemed to extend across the whole normal human spectrum there. The only emotion he ever felt even more intensely than that, was…

Fury. Whenever he was deprived of autonomy and freedom, he felt everything between indignation and depression-induced apathy… But when he was denied the chance to fight his own battles, he seethed with apoplectic rage until he burst.

Even then, though, it took being overloaded with Voldemort’s own anger during fifth year, for that first Harry to finally start losing his temper openly. And he still didn’t lose control of all of himself, just his mouth.

The Harry of now didn’t feel any more guilty or ashamed over any of that either, except maybe not going through all the way – if he was man enough to defy Dolores Umbridge in class, he should’ve been man enough to refuse to attend her detentions, no matter what that harridan or McGonagall or Dumbledore had to say.

If anything, with the way things turned out by the time his children were old enough for Hogwarts, Harry felt like that him hadn’t gone far enough.

No, that’s not right either.

The Malfoys may have been pardoned, along with a few others, but that was just a handful of exceptions in payment for Narcissa’s silence when she checked on Harry after Voldemort hit him with Avada Kedavra. She lied about him being dead, and didn’t even make any demands in return, it was enough that Harry had told her Draco was alive.

This way, there was no blanket amnesty for all the Death Eaters – the Malfoys sold out all the others, who were killed or put away. It was a complete reversal of how the First War ended, when the ones who got convicted were the exception. Because of this, their world didn’t see a repeat of the same mess as the first time. It allowed them to reform the government properly that time around. Hermione never would’ve become Minister for Magic if they hadn’t.

Harry parted with Neville feeling a lot lighter, and a lot less squeamish about all the things he wasn’t squeamish about.

Enough so that he was finally willing to broach the topic with his foster family.

It did not go the way he expected.

“Oh, is that all?” Nicolas Flamel, it turned out, had very different standards of behaviour versus the modern world. “Harry, I don’t keep to myself because I hate other people. Maybe you missed it but I come from a time when outlawry was still practiced. Not in France where I lived, more’s the pity, but still.”

Hey, that’s right! Outlaws weren’t just those gunslingers from western films, the original legal meaning was person declared as outside the protection of the law. With people like that, you were allowed to do anything to them, taunt, hurt, torture, even kill, anyone and everyone was legally allowed to persecute or kill them. Encouraged even.

“Honestly Harry, the fact that outlawry isn’t still practiced is a damned shame,” Nicolas shook his head. “A shame exceeded only by the gall of modern government busybodies who presume to dictate even what you’re allowed to do on your own property. Laws today are more interested with protecting criminals than the innocents. Courts will even send a man to prison for killing the deviant that raped his unflowered daughter to death.”

No way, Nicolas had to be exaggerating for emphasis, right? But it wasn’t like he ever lied to Harry…

Wait.

Entire charities and advocacy organisations sprang up over there, after stuff like what Nicolas said, even turned the criminals into martyrs for political groups, Hary admitted to himself as he recalled one of many nasty things Lorne knew about the muggle world, and were probably the same on this side too. Some of them happened before Lorne was borne, before Harry was born.

But still, even here… that kind of thing actually happened? What was Harry saying, there were still Goa’uld living free on Earth, that sort of thing would be right up their alley.

“It’s not just Tom Riddle either,” Nicolas continued. “Many of his followers committed enough crimes foul enough to have earned the outlaw label several times over. If right to get even and outlawry were to make a return, it would be a much fairer world.”

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Voldemort. And the Death Eaters. Outlaws.

Harry Potter’s cognitive dissonance evaporated so fast that he felt abruptly light-headed.

He thought this might be a good time and place to laugh madly, but no such impulse came. Instead, he just felt as if the Erlking was looking at himself from the other end of history with an unmistakable air of ‘no shit, kid.’

“I think I owe Sirius an apology.”

To others, Harry’s comment might have come out of nowhere, but Nicolas Flamel was a diviner. He was well used to sudden ideas and epiphanies that made no sense when seen from the outside.

In hindsight, while Sirius Black had failed to be a hero, it wasn’t for lack of trying. If he’d managed to hunt down Pettigrew and kill him successfully, he’d have definitely been hailed as a hero after the dust settled. Even the whole ‘taking the law in your own hands’ thing wouldn’t have been a problem, aurors and hit wizards had a license to kill Death Eaters at that point.

Sirius probably would’ve still spent some time in lockup, but just a few days while they investigated, not in Azkaban. He’d have then become the guardian of the Boy-Who-Lived on top of being the great avenger of said baby’s parents.

Pettigrew also wouldn’t get to spend the next twelve years sleeping with children, never mind still be around fourteen years later to bring Voldemort back to life with Harry’s unwilling cooperation. And blood.

“Expecto Patronum. Sirius, I’m coming over, you don’t mind, right? See you in ten.”

Harry’s godfather was very bemused by Harry going for a visit just to apologize for thinking bad of him out of nowhere. Sirius reassured him as best he could, which wasn’t bad at all once it occurred to the man to point out that thoughtcrime was hogwash. Alas, he soon had to leave for a meeting with Dumbledore at the ministry, in the hopes of getting some extended access to certain Department of Mysteries areas.

It was, all in all, supremely ironic that Harry himself ended up making more progress than anyone else again, in their research.

He hadn’t even been trying for it. He’d just been a mixture of bored and antsy after Sirius left him with a promise of being back in a couple of hours tops, so he set about walking up and down Grimmauld Place. He hadn’t tested the endurance of his ‘see in all directions’ power in a while, he figured two hours would be nice enough exercise.

That was how he found out, by complete accident, that there were things he couldn’t see with that ability, even though his normal eyes could. Worse, there were things that cast huge blind areas in his second sight’s range, or at least spells that could have that effect. It still alerted Harry that something was wrong, but it wasn’t quite like noticing that you suddenly had a blind spot in your vision. It was more like the edges of that blind spot tried to squeeze together so you didn’t notice that you couldn’t notice them, and didn’t quite manage it.

Harry used a duster – with a very long wooden handle, Black Family curses were no joke – to wipe the dust off the display case. There was a pendant inside it, the sort made of two parts on a hinge that hid something inside, hanging from the neck of a headless bust.

“Half-Blood Master must not touch Master’s locket!”

What the bloody hell?

“-. .-“

This is the sad story of Sirius Black’ younger brother. A marked Death Eater, Regulus Black betrayed Voldemort at the very last moment. He thus ended up dying in order to steal one of the soul anchors that the Dark Lord had made in order to become immortal.

A decade and a half later, the discovery of this story’s grim end led to the third most shocking day of Sirius Black’s life, and the darkest irony in Harry Potter’s life too: the first major breakthrough that he, Nicolas, and the rest of their little conspiracy had in corporealizing the incorporeal were Voldemort’s horcruxes.

Even this was just a fluke, and barely a consolation prize at that.

Horcruxes were rare and obscure dark magic, as was the method of undeath they were based on (phylacteries). Complex and demanding too, the spirit was easy enough to harm but the soul was a much tougher nut to crack, nearly irreducible. It made sense, in a way, that you needed to do something against all reason to fracture it – if the soul was your identity, then cracking it meant to crack your own identity.

Calling Voldemort insane would be giving him an excuse, but there was a large spectrum of bad psychological traits that sanity still allowed for. Narcissism, obsessive behaviour, paranoia, those were just the three most obvious flaws possessed by the Dark Lord. It was everyone’s bad luck that his sheer competence offset all of those flaws and then some.

Voldemort had loaded his horcruxes up with incredibly powerful protection spells and curses. It wasn’t just that the locket was impervious to all harm until Harry used parseltongue to open it – what they were comfortable trying at least, without extreme hazard protection. The thing also had a nasty legilimency-based attack built in.

Also, it was protected from divination, as well as passive forms of extrasensory perception if Harry’s inability to perceive them directly with his omnidirectional sight was any indication. It wasn’t perfect, but that just made it all the more impressive since that camouflage seemed to be entirely coincidental.

The locket wasn’t protected against psychometry though. Not Harry’s, at least, when he evoked himself from when he still had the scar. He got to learn more than he ever wanted about that form of immortality, and it was immortality instead of just unlife.

The magic Voldemort used to actually affect the soul directly was their greatest breakthrough yet, if only because it was Tom’s own power and will that did it, rather than Magic picking up any slack as was the case for the subsequent enchantments.

As if they didn’t already know that Voldemort was the most powerful Dark Lord ever, now they knew he’d managed to build up personal power enough to defy the constant drain of Magic, in spite of said Magic.

At least now we know for sure that it’s possible?

It was darkly impressive that Tom Riddle had the power and the will to do that while literally committing the ultimate self-harm.

Harry didn’t know what it said about Tom Riddle, or even Herpo the Foul who originally invented horcruxes, that premeditated murder was enough to split their soul. Repeatedly, in the former’s case. Tom had done a lot of torture and other acts of malice aforethought from when he was a young child. He never cared about who suffered or how, intentionally or otherwise. Actually, he seemed to enjoy it. Or if not enjoy it, take vindication from it.

More likely murder was the unnatural act, which spoke a lot better of mankind than most anything else. Some people liked to claim that murder was just another part of human nature, because nature itself is cruel by nature. But it wasn’t like all animals of the same race habitually murdered each other, especially herbivores and omnivores. Actually, it was rare even for territorial predators – usually two of the same species just fought over rights to an area and the loser submitted or ran away.

The old myths say humans were originally much grander and nobler.

Harry’s personal experience wearing the skull of Brann the Blessed proved that the former, at least, was completely true. In that context, not much was more denobling than murdering another human being.

It’s not enough to murder just anybody though, Harry thought darkly. To make a horcrux, the one you murder has to be an innocent, or at least someone who doesn’t ‘deserve’ it somehow. Someone whose murder is ‘wrong.’ Unearned, maybe, from your own perspective. Your own soul’s perspective.

It was quite gruesome that the evil didn’t stop there. After you split the soul, there came the spells to bind that fragment to an object. The way this was done was yet more self-harm – after ripping out part of your very self, you needed to twist the sense of identity of that microcosm of your very self through the identity of the object. This was achieved through what Harry could best liken to, essentially self-inflicted, brainwashing via torturous mutilation.

Incidentally, this meant that the receiving object needed to have its own solid identity, or something Magic recognized as identity, to twist it through. This meant it needed to be either another living being – which would eventually die as all mortal things did, thus defeating the purpose – or a highly magical object with a very long and famous history. That was why Voldemort used the Founders’ artefacts for his horcruxes, instead of just shoving his soul fragments into random grains of sand. It wasn’t just megalomania.

Unfortunately, the difficulty of making horcruxes even if he let Magic do all the heavy lifting didn’t say anything good about the possibility of imposing any sort of effect without it. Especially on much bigger spectres, never mind literal gods. Or near enough that the difference might not matter.

Like Voldemort, Harry would have to do it all by himself, with his own power.

He had nowhere near that amount of power.

Probably.

It was these thoughts that percolated through Harry Potter’s mind all day on June 24, 1995.