21 Epilogue

Epilogue

The Nightmare Man

Summary: In the depths of the Ministry, there is a cell for the world's most dangerous man… and he wants out.

Pairing/s: None.

Warnings: Time travel, OOC-characters, Light!bashing, Twisted!Harry, Evil!Harry, violence, mention of gore. Yeah, stuff like that.

Disclaimers: I don't own Harry Potter nor do I make any money writing this.

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Updated 2021

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Epilogue

A few months later

The heat lay thick in the air, the sun blazing down. The summer was turning out to be hot and humid with little to no rain.

Harrison solved this by having at least three or four of his children nearby when outside. The Dementors were naturally chilly, and cooled the air around them which he still didn't know the reason for, and they were only too happy to be near him to cool him down.

"You're weird," Harry commented. "Now please make a swimming pool."

After having Harry explain what exactly a swimming pool was, Harrison did make one and Harry refused to leave it except at night. More or less. Someone, possibly Severus, dragged him out when he tried to sleep there.

On this very day, Lucy was learning to swim with Elise and Joanne as her teachers. They did like the pool nearly as much as the children did. As heat apparently wasn't good for small children Angel was inside, away from the sun, with Severus as baby-sitter. The title sounded very odd, but at least he kept up with the rumours of actually being a vampire, unable to handle the sun. Harrison had offered to give him a set of fake fangs for when he returned as a potions professor at Hogwarts, and Severus hadn't said no.

But for now Harrison didn't want to do or make anything.

"Summers didn't use to be this hot, did they?" he said once Lucian approached. "They can't have been."

"It's quite normal nowadays. You've just been spending too many summers locked in a cell underground."

"At least there was no bloody heat down there…"

The Dementors moved closer as Harrison fanned himself. Lucian sat down next to Harrison, in the shade, and said:

"Why not use a cooling charm, master?"

"I'm not good with those kinds of spells, you know that," Harrison said. "It's a bit embarrassing, really… I can move a mountain, no problems, but ask me to levitate a spoon… Merlin, magic is complicated at times."

"You can levitate things, master."

"Have you ever seen me levitate a spoon, Lucian?"

Lucian thought this over as Harrison tried to get more comfortable.

"No," he had to admit.

"Well, there wasn't much left of the spoon after I tried, to be honest."

"… Our great master, defeated by attempting to levitate a spoon."

"You know, I can hear the laughter in those words… oh, Voldemort's here. Doesn't that man ever stop working?"

"No, I don't think he does," Lucian said.

"At least he didn't run into Harry this time. That was one awkward silence I walked in on."

It had happened not too long after the final battle that finally killed off Dumbledore and most of his Order. Harrison had been dungeons preparing some guts, for some reason he didn't remember now, and no one else had been in the hall when Voldemort arrived. Well, no one else but Harry.

Harrison had walked up ten minutes later to a tension he could cut through. To make that tension go away he had made perhaps a bit stupid decision and painted stripes on Harry's cheeks with the blood on his fingers, making the teen shriek in rage. They ended up having a physical scuffle that made Voldemort snort and the tension was gone.

Harry was still wary of the Dark Lord but they did manage to greet each other politely before one of them fled from the room or corridor they happened to meet in.

Voldemort approached them, looking at the pool before focusing on Harrison with his Dementors, one of them holding a rotten hand on his neck to cool the skin down. Voldemort turned to Lucian and said:

"When he made you into his servants, he did hand over his sanity to you lot, didn't he?"

"Hey," Harrison protested.

"Sometimes, I'm inclined to believe that," Lucian said.

"Hey!"

"Would you like something to drink, Voldemort?" Lucian continued.

"Ywgraine already offered and is on her way. I assume she won't poison it."

"No, that's just what master does."

"Once!" Harrison protested. "I did it once, and it was to my own drink. Alright, now, up, move up."

The Dementors moved away, passing Voldemort and slipping into the darkness of the manor. But one stayed behind, breathing down Harrison's neck. Harrison had thrown off his robes, rolled up his sleeves and at some point left his shoes behind to be picked up by someone else before or after they stumbled over them.

"Are you here on a break, or have you actually finished work for the day?" Harrison wondered.

"You're still not going to become headmaster of Hogwarts?"

"That again? I've told you, paperwork and I don't tend to agree. I set paperwork on fire. It offends me."

"He's impossible," Voldemort told Lucian. "I ought to make you headmaster to punish him."

"You're not taking Lucian away!"

"Master, I don't have the qualifications to become headmaster anyway," Lucian told Harrison.

"Are you here because of the headmaster situation?"

"Yes, and to take a break. If I had started on another set of paperwork, I might have just followed your example and set it on fire."

Ywgraine came with Voldemort's drink and then went off to the pool.

"New installation?" the Dark Lord wondered.

"Yes, Harry told me how they should look like and all that."

"You've lived in this time once before, and you don't remember swimming pools?"

"I did know what they were, but I hadn't been in one before."

Voldemort now knew a short version of Harrison's past as Harry Potter. Freaking out was an understatement and Harrison was quite certain the Dark Lord had never before been that close to passing out. After that he nearly made Harrison pass out by asking around five-hundred questions and not really allowing Harrison to breathe between the answers. Then he asked five-hundred more questions while staring, before declaring the whole day insane and went home to lie down in a dark room.

He returned the next day and demanded to know how it was to see Dumbledore die twice. After that he requested to see memories of Harrison's life as a teen, but as he kept returning to how Harrison could time-travel, and also go to a completely different dimension Harrison put a stop to it before he had to go and lie down in a dark room. The whole thing was headache-inducing, to be honest.

It had taken them a few days to get over the whole thing, and now Voldemort treated Harrison's past as a very fucked-up place they should never touch, not even with a ten-foot pole. It didn't stop Voldemort from sort of hovering around the subject every now and then.

"But you lived in this sort of time," Voldemort stressed, still on the swimming pool. "I haven't lived amongst Muggles since I was seventeen and I still know what a swimming pool is."

"That was a long time for me," Harrison replied.

"But there's always been swimming pools! Or pools of water, in a man-built space."

"Still don't remember."

"You just have a bad memory," Lucian told him.

"You're about as old as I am, so shut up," Harrison snapped.

"Well, you must have made us with better memory than yourself."

"Lucian, shut up."

Voldemort snorted and leaned back, sipping at his drink. They were silent for a bit.

"He looks happy," Voldemort said at last, gesturing at Harry when Harrison made a questioning noise. "Despite losing both of his parents."

"He's strong," Harrison said.

"He doesn't hate Severus for killing them?"

"No. I thought he would, for a bit, but he doesn't. Lily could've been spared, but she decided not to let that happen. It did pain Severus to kill her. They were apparently quite good friends before I came along."

"So I heard. Why didn't she just give up?"

"Why didn't Lily Potter give up?" Harrison said, laughing. "She could never accept our side as anything but pure evil, and that was her right. Just as I have my right to think her a complete idiot. She was so disgustingly stubborn."

She hadn't gone down without a fight. She kept at it. Harrison had seen Severus' memories, and knew Severus had killed her to prevent further trouble. Sparing her at the final battle wouldn't have made Lily give up. she would've just give them more trouble.

"But you didn't kill her," Voldemort pointed out.

"No, I didn't. I even let her go more than once. Sentimental reasons, perhaps? She was my mother after all."

"Severus knew her since he was a child and still killed her."

"To be honest, if he hadn't done it, I probably would've eventually. Sentimentality only last so long, especially with annoying people." Harrison thought over his actions a bit. "Also, taunting parents are fun. I've been doing that for a long time."

"You're a horrible person," Voldemort concluded. "And so am I. Cheers for that."

Lunch was served outside, and Harrison was beginning to believe that most of his servants would prefer to follow Harry's example and sleep in the pool at night. They were already more or less spending their time outside in the shade. The manor should be quite cool considering it was made out of stone but maybe Harrison had fucked up when building it.

The only really cool place was in the dungeons and no one but Harrison and Severus wanted to be down there for an extended period of time. Elise had the nerve to call it gloomy.

Harrison's room was chilly, but that was because he invited the Dementors inside while he slept. His servants didn't want any Dementors sometimes literally breathing down their necks. Apparently the sounds they made were nightmare-inducing, which Harrison had to remind his servants was the entire point of creating Dementors. That, and killing people. Well, not strictly killing them but removing them from the plane of normal existence.

Harry came up from the pool for the food, and sat down next to Harrison. Voldemort, who opted to eat before going back to work, stiffened a bit and when Harry noticed that, so did he. But the climbing tension was broken by an oblivious Lucy who barrelled into Harrison's legs, bounced off and then decided to climb him, using his clothes to hold on.

"Excuse me," Harrison said, "we have talked about this. I am not a climbing pole, remember?"

"Tree then?" she tried.

"Nope, not a tree, my skin is definitely too smooth to be bark."

Lucy giggled at that, and then hugged him around the chest. Harrison's arms were raised and he looked at Harry in alarm.

"I don't know what to do now," he hissed at the teen.

"Just hug her back, you weirdo," Harry replied. "That's all she wants right now."

"What do you mean, right now?" Harrison said.

"Oh, I'm gonna have fun watching you raise them," Harry said. "They'll wrap you completely around their little fingers."

"That sounds rather impossible, my spine doesn't bend that well. Or do you mean they'll break it?"

"You're so weird, you know what I mean."

"I can see it happening though," Voldemort added. "They aren't afraid of you, haven't been even from the start, and you don't try to frighten them."

"I don't know a single thing about raising children!" Harrison hissed.

"Stop your bemoaning, master, they're not that difficult," Elise said. "Besides, if you didn't want one you certainly shouldn't have picked up two of them."

Harrison gave in, because of course he did when it came to those little cretins, and pulled Lucy to a better position so she could have a go at the sandwiches that had been prepared. It was all very domestic, but Harrison put that out of his mind for now.

Severus brought Angel out; no sun at all wasn't good either, and Ywgraine and Joanne happily took her from Severus' arms.

"I survived hundreds of years without sun," Harrison told them.

"And see how you turned out, master," Elise replied.

"… I mean, I see your point, but I don't think it had anything to do with the sun."

"Hundreds of years?" Lucy said. "You're old!"

"Of course I am," Harrison told her. "I am old and evil and I'll eat up all the sandwiches for you if you don't eat properly."

"That'd be the day," Elise muttered as Lucy said:

"I want ice-cream."

"Tough luck, I'll eat that too."

"No, you can't!"

"If you eat properly, you may have some ice-cream."

Lucy began eating properly, drinking the juice Harry handed over. Voldemort watched for a while before saying:

"This is such a bizarre situation… you're even wiping her face."

"Right, I know I'm not very scary anymore to you or my servants, but I can make an exception. Would you like your tongue split in two or completely removed?"

Voldemort was very polite and didn't laugh in his face. Harrison was very polite back and only threw a knife at him, allowing him enough time to deflect it.

-o-

Harrison rarely found time for himself nowadays, which was a startling difference from how his life was before. In the cell, he was punished by solitude and before that he often chose solitude. That and Dementors, but they preferred peace and quiet so it wasn't much of a difference than being alone.

Now he could run across Europe and be sure someone was chasing after him. Probably Elise, because she was used to chase people. The servants' need to protect him was something Harrison was learning to accept, and even want. He was strong enough on his own, just stupid and not properly protecting himself, but he did want to be protected a little bit. Like when he was a teenager, he had wanted to be protected.

People had done so, before he was thrown into prison as Harry Potter. Thrown away, and discarded, save for one person. Everyone but George had abandoned him. Had Fred survived the last battle, Harrison would have had two friends. But then again, he was always meant to come through to this dimension. He was… he was always meant to lose George.

He was always meant to become the Nightmare Lord.

Harrison leaned against the railing of the balcony connected to his bedroom, and looked up at the dark sky. He couldn't sleep. It was a recurring problem, but right now he felt like he had spent so much time sleeping away in that dark cell that he didn't want to sleep. So instead of sleeping he thought of George Weasley.

Not this dimension's George; he was asleep, bed next to his brother, both of them probably dreaming what pranks they should plan on people. Other people, not Harrison. Harrison hadn't gone so soft that he'd allow pranks. They had tried, but learnt that the Nightmare Lord did know how to prank people, and do it well.

Anyway, tonight he was thinking of George that came to Azkaban as often as he could. The one who played Muggle chess with Harrison and the one who fought for him. The one who finally managed to play things right and get Harrison out of prison.

The one Harrison had cared for, and then forgotten. Harrison started counting the stars, and then sighed. There was no way to change the things that had happened, but he had been left with only memories of George, and then even forgot his entire existence. It did lead to him becoming the Nightmare Lord, but it also left him unable to remember how it was like to care for anyone.

"Master, are you alright?"

Harrison turned back to see Lucian stand in the doorway to the room.

"Just thinking of a very old friend," Harrison replied. "Or young, depending on how much of a headache one would like to have before bed."

"What do you mean, master?" Lucian said, frowning.

"Oh, you want a headache?"

"No."

"Then you want me to have a headache."

"No, master."

"Then let's leave it at that. An old friend, and a young one. Either way, he's gone now."

"So master actually had a friend."

"Yes, I did. I was terrible at it in the end. I forgot him for a long time."

Harrison walked back to the bed, leaning back against the headboard while stretching out his legs. Lucian moved to close the door to the balcony.

"Leave them open, Lucian. Come here. Children…"

The Dementors perked up, and Harrison's eyes moved to the cloak he had made into their home. One by one they vanished into the cloak and Lucian sat down on the bed.

"You didn't have to pull them back just for me," he said.

"I know, but I did it anyway. Or do you want to go back to sleep?"

Lucian hummed, and then laid down on the bed.

"I meant your own bed."

"I'm quite comfortable here, master, just pretend I don't exist."

"Rather difficult, considering I won't sleep."

"You should," Lucian said. "I heard raising children is quite an exhausting process."

"I see," Harrison said. "Then why did I get two?"

"Well, they are quite adorable."

"I didn't choose them because they were adorable."

"Then you didn't think at all, master, because you have a tendency to do that."

That was true. He really didn't think ahead. Honestly, he had rarely done so ever since he was a child. Harrison groaned and slid down onto the bed so he could face Lucian. Lucian looked right back at him.

"Am I still the nightmare man?" he asked. "Or just an idiot?"

"A bit of both, master. A bit of both."

"… I suppose that's better than being just an idiot."

One of the Dementors peeked up from underneath the bed behind Lucian. Harrison said nothing. It came closer and breathed right into Lucian's ear, making him shriek.

"Master!"

That was a bit evil, Harrison thought. But that's just who he was. A bit of a nightmare man.

End