Chapter 1
A twenty-five-year-old Harry Potter sat nursing a glass of fire whiskey in his hand as he stared at the morbid wall of the ramshackle house in which he currently lived. The wallpaper was peeling off from here and there.At some places, even the old, weathered and beaten looking bricks could be seen. But it was only reflecting the state of the house. Of the moderate size house, only one or two rooms still had a roof standing over it and broken furniture littered the whole house. This was the current home of Harry Potter, once the saviour of the Wizarding World and the Chosen one. Also functioning as the temporary headquarter of the resistance. Resistance against the Emperor of half of the world, Lord Voldemort.
He remembered vividly, the events of the last eight years which led him to this state. How could he forget the betrayals of everyone he once cared about? Masked under the guise of looking out for their own flesh and blood, everyone had turned towards the winning side. Dumbledore’s Army, The Weasleys and even his long-time best friends. All had abandoned him in the fight against Voldemort.
All bar one.
It all started eight years ago, when he started hunting Horcruxes alongside his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. In the beginning, the hunt went as expected. There were a few bumps in the road but by the end of the year, they had destroyed almost all the Horcruxes. It was when they were heading to Hogwarts to destroy the last Horcrux that he received the biggest shock of his life.
Voldemort was waiting for them in Hogsmeade. Realizing that he had walked into a trap, he tried to hold onto Hermione so that they could immediately disapparate, only to find the bushy-haired girl’s wand trained on him. Before he could make sense of the situation, he felt another wand jabbing him in the neck. Turning around, he found Ron smirking.
“It’s not that we have anything against you. We just don’t see ourselves winning and we have our families to think of.” That was the reason he heard from the mouth of the girl he had relied on so much.
“Yeah,” Ron didn’t let go of the moment to rub salt in his wound. “Did you really think we could defeat someone like him by ourselves? I had doubted it from the beginning and when he contacted us with the offer to pardon us and our family if we helped in your capture then we thought, why not? You are a great friend Harry but we weren’t going to put the life of our families in danger just for you.”
At that moment he felt nothing. His mind had shut down completely. Darkness encroached upon his vision. The thing that he least expected, heck the thing farthest from his mind, had happened to him. His closest friends had betrayed him.
He would have preferred to die at that moment. He was ready for it. But even his own body wasn’t with him then. Instincts honed from the very beginning to save his life awakened at that moment, and without being aware of it, he was fighting back.
He escaped from that trap and somehow made his way to the Weasley household, The Burrow. He had hoped to find some shelter at the place that he had come to recognize as home. The people that lived there had come to see him as their own son.
But what awaited him there was a harsh reality of how blood will always be blood. At first, they welcomed him with open arms. When he told them about Ron and Hermione, they assured him that they didn’t know. They suggested that he sleep there for the night before going out again.
Once again, it was his instincts that came to his rescue. The death eaters would have stunned him and taken him away if he hadn’t sensed their approach.
Disillusioned by everyone, he ran away. No longer was there anyone he trusted. For six months, he evaded his pursuers. Not because he wanted to live, but because there was nothing else for him to latch onto. The only purpose he had left was the destruction of Horcrux.
There was one person, though, where he knew he could find solace. But he didn’t want to go there. For if he was rejected there, Harry knew he would truly die.
In the end, his luck ran out. There was so much he could run. More than two dozen Death Eaters tracked him down.
It was the hardest battle of his life. There wasn’t a single part of his body which wasn’t bleeding.Even his finger joints were broken. Yet, he fought back. Even without wanting to, he strived to live. There was a part of him screaming to survive. He didn’t know why, but it did. Blinded by grief and shock, having his light blocked from him, he just listened to that voice and matched spell with a spell.
In the end, he managed to survive. It was a feat he hadn’t managed to reproduce since then. His vision was blurry and his body and soul broken completely. He had lost so much blood, the number of broken bones counted more than the intact ones. He was sure then that he would die now. The one thing he had the satisfaction of was that Voldemort didn’t see him dying, nor did his traitorous friends.
When he came back to reality, the first he saw was a curtain of red color, his favorite shade too. As sleep vanished from his eyes, he came to know that the curtain of red belonged to his favorite person.
He just couldn’t hold it anymore. Clinging to Ginny Weasley, he cried like a baby. He hadn’t cried since he was ten. But now, he couldn’t hold it anymore, the weight of the treachery was too much for him to bear. He told her everything, of the treachery of his best friends and her parents. There was a small part of him that feared that she might have betrayed him too but seeing her in front of him, he couldn’t bring himself to care anymore.
Ginny just listened patiently, occasionally offering soothing words as Harry cried on her shoulder while she rubbed his back.
When Harry had calmed down a bit, she told him about what was going on in Hogwarts, how Fawkes carried him here, how almost everyone had aligned with Voldemort. And, Also the beheading of Remus Lupin and his family. The guy had refused to abandon Harry and paid the ultimate price.
“I am alone Ginny, there’s no one left,” his voice was soulless, without a single spark of life.
Ginny just pulled back slightly and said one line which made Harry fall in love with her even more, if that was possible.
“No, Harry. Even if the whole world turns against you, I’ll always be by your side. I’ll fight the whole world with you.”
And that was when Harry knew that this girl would never betray him, even if it meant going against her own family. That he had found a true companion.
And yet, here he was, after eight years, completely alone. Fate was cruel, he decided. First, it took away his parents, then his friends and then the love of his life.
A loud laugh reverberated through the whole house. This was the world of traitors, backstabbers, and selfish people, and he was trying to save it.
He resented it. Resented it that he was alive, resented that everyone he loved was dead. What did he ever do to deserve it?
A clang, the voice of glass breaking, and a splash. The glass fell to the floor and broke into thousand tiny pieces, But Harry’s stupor was unbroken. He was lost in a world of memories.
Memories of Sirius in that gloomy Grimmauld Number 12.
Memories of Remus teaching in a kind way.
Memories of Tonks being clumsy.
But, most of all, memories of Ginny. Her smile, her warmth, the radiance of her red hair, the glow of her cheek, of them marrying, of them living happily in this house, of him becoming a father.
“WHY?” a scream that would have shaken the heaven, should have shaken the heaven, ripped from his throat. Tears streamed down his face covered with his hands as he tried to find words to express his sorrow.
“Why?” Nothing but this.
“Why?” no other word came to his mind. Furiously, he searched his mind for some other word to relieve his grief, yet the only thing he could utter was “why, why?” till it became incomprehensible among his sobs.
Time lost all meaning as he kept crying. He didn’t know when darkness overtook him and he fell down on the cold hard floor, unconscious.
