Harry stood frozen in Azkaban with his mind racing towards nowhere, his heart beating out of his chest and his pupils so dilated any outside observer would have likely assumed that he was high out of his mind.
The issue was that there were several high level decisions he had to make in a short amount of time before he was discovered, and he was struggling with the process.
Firstly, Rosier was dead, Harry had killed him, even if he hadn’t in fact intended it.
Although, to be fair, considering what he’d seen in the man’s mind, he would have likely killed him regardless after extracting all the information.
Now Harry was essentially being offered a choice of action.
There was no alarm being rung at the same three dementors were still standing outside the cell sucking away at his happiness.
In the original series, Voldemort had broken his followers out of Azkaban so as to immediately replenish his forces.
Harry now had the unique opportunity of doing the funniest thing ever.
He looked down at Rosier’s emaciated body.
It was an ethical dilemma at heart.
He knew that things could very well develop into Voldemort once again breaking out his followers. He’d just done the very same thing with Pettigrew.
After what he’d seen in Rosier’s mind, he was more sure than ever that these weren’t the type of people that should ever see the light of day again. The things Rosier had done and had seen his fellow death eaters do were…
Indiscrebable.
If Azkaban was impenetrable Harry wouldn’t have minded leaving all the prisoners here to rot until they expired of natural causes, but he was fighting a war.
A war in which coincidentally, every single one of his enemies was a real war criminal and genocidal maniac.
There was no nuance, no shades of grey.
If you stood in front of the switch that diverted the trolley from a track covered in hundreds of innocents towards a track covered with twelve or so war criminals. Would you pull the switch?
There was no real ethical dilemma, no real argument about preference or morality or quantity or utilitarianism. There would be unforeseen consequences, definitely, but Harry struggled to say that not pulling the switch was anything other than cowardice, any argument to not do so a way of acknowledging the reality of the situation.
If anyone ever found out…
He shook himself like a wet dog, turned around to face the dementors looking at him curiously on the other side of the cell.
Then he shrunk, immediately losing the creature’s interest. They floated off towards their usual patrol.
They didn’t even go to report that an inmate had died.
Harry slowly made his way to the next cell where he transformed to stand atop a sleeping hulk of a man muttering in his sleep. A single act of telekinesis confirmed the dark mark, another woke the man up, a wave of the wand caused a mind invasion to occur and a highly fragile individual to expire.
Just like that.
So simple.
So easy.
Memories, horrible memories washed over Harry as he traversed the cells.
He saw himself, from the perspective of the death eaters, commit acts so inhumane he never could have even imagined them.
Forcing muggle parents to eat their own children under the imperio.
Slowly enlarging cooking utensils inserted in a muggleborn’s rectum.
Things more horrible than both of those previous things combined.
It was after Harry had done the full circle, reached the last cell, that he finally met someone more cognizant.
“Who are you?” Bellatrix asked harshly as she cowered in the corner of her cell, hands beneath her armpits, lips blue from cold.
“Any last words?” Harry asked with dead eyes.
“Here to take revenge?” the death eater asked in a baby voice. “Is this ickle little boy here to avenge his paweeenntts.” She threw her head back and cackled. Then she suddenly sprang up, lunging towards him with a sharp bit of stone clutched in her right hand.
It was only Harry’s practice in sword fighting that saved him, being otherwise completely exhausted. He instinctually raised a leg in the air and kicked the approaching woman back, where she hurled and sank to the floor to expel the meagre contents of her stomach.
“Very well, who am I to fault which words you choose as your last,” he commented coldly, raising his wand again, only to furrow his brows in surprise as the deranged woman looked up to meet his gaze.
She was fighting back.
Not very well mind you, but she was resisting the probe.
Harry pushed harder, wrestled the woman’s mind into submission, barely managed to catch a glimpse of some scenes that didn’t seem all too connected. Hogwarts, torturing muggles, fighting aurors, fucking her now dead husband, raiding a mountain hut in the Swiss countryside.
A hut in the Swiss countryside?
Harry barely managed to identify the sign of the hallows, or more accurately, Grindelwald’s mark on one of the wooden walls of the warehouse before the memory cut off like it had for all the other inmates.
“How did you die?” Harry asked confusedly. “You still had some fight in you.” He looked down from the woman’s eyes at the puddle of bile beneath her.
Red.
“You bit off your own tongue?” he asked quietly. “For a master that you haven’t seen in twelve years?” He shook his head. “What exactly did he do to inspire that loyalty?” he wondered.
Then he looked outside the small slit serving as a window in the woman’s cell to see a hint of light.
The sun would rise soon.
Harry looked up at the dementors who were once again standing in front of the cell.
Only two now.
One had left.
Not much time now.
Harry pointed his wand at the iron bars of the cell.
“Maledictus Ignis,” he cast, a wide wave of purple fire erupting from his wand to cover the dementors who didn’t seem to care all that much, but which more importantly, started spreading to the other cells to burn the corpses Harry had left behind.
He waved his wand idly, making sure to also cover Bellatrix before throwing one last look at the now burning prison.
Now he could only hope that dementors didn’t have the ability to recognise human magical signatures, or souls, or whatever.
He dived towards the slit in the wall, transforming in a lobster mid air and jumping right out from the tallest floor.
After a few exhilarating seconds he crashlanded in the water three dozen meters below with a small plop barely heard over the crashing waves and promptly swam off, completely and utterly exhausted.
-/-
It was after Dobby had been called to transport him back to Hogwarts that Harry brought out the time turner he’d left behind and spun it five times.
Generally inadvisable to do so when one had in fact left the premises of the non-chaotic environment that permitted time travel, but sometimes sacrifices had to be made.
The rising dawn was quickly replaced by the cloudy dark night sky and Harry slipped into the bed he’d just vacated, but not after casting a hundred or so inane hygiene charms to cleanse his wand.
Then he just lay there and stared at the ceiling, not sleeping until the very same morning he’d just escaped from.
He’d killed twelve people that night and not a wink of sleep was allowed to him.
He didn’t bother taking a potion either, he had the feeling that it wouldn’t work.
What had happened last night had just been that momentous.
He continued laying in bed while everyone else in his dorm room slowly woke up, started chatting, and started getting ready for the day. It was a weekend thankfully, so his staying in bed was not particularly notable beyond a simple, “if you didn’t drive yourself so hard during the week you’d have energy for the weekend,” from Cedric.
Then came the horrified gasps and screams from the common room that could be heard even from in his dorm as the students who’d been too lazy to get breakfast got a hold of the most recent newspaper.
Harry slowly got up, feeling as if he was viewing himself from the third perspective, took a long shower that he hadn’t taken in a very very long time, and got dressed.
Ambling his way downstairs he grabbed a newspaper from the table, the other students loudly debating each other on the seating arrangements of the room.
“Slaughter in Azkaban, Convicted Death Eaters Burned Alive by Dark Magic in Maximum Security Wing.” Harry raised an eyebrow at the title.
Burned alive? It seemed that death through straining of the mind due to a mind attack was somewhat hard to diagnose in the ashes.
The second part was also wrong.
He hadn’t used dark magic. Just a minor precursor to fiendfyre, no negative feelings required, just an endless hunger for destruction.
He paused.
Well, maybe it was a bit dark.
“What do you think, Evans?” one of the prefects suddenly asked him from where the rest of the Hufflepuffs were gathered up.
Harry put down the paper after verifying that there were no leads and slowly shook his head.
“Is it that much different if they get burned alive, than if they slowly rot away as food for the dementors?” he asked rhetorically. “Seems to me they got the longer end of the stick going out like that.” He turned around and left the common room as a new discussion arose.
Morality, ethics, law, compassion, anger, hatred, rage, disappointment.
Hufflepuff was one of the houses where its members had more victims than aggressors in the last war.
It had been the Slytherins who’d lost family members last night.
Harry, still detached from everything, got a food basket from the kitchens before making his way outside with a few warming charms and sat down in the abandoned courtyard of the castle.
He pulled out a sandwich prepared for him by the house elves and took a bite, before gagging it right back up and spitting it on the grass at his feet.
Smoked meat.
Didn’t sit well with him for some reason.
Harry promptly dropped the sandwich back into the cute little picnic basket he’d conjured and buried his face in his hands.
“What the fuck am I doing?” he asked himself quietly.
“Wasting food, it seems like,” an amused voice suddenly said from a few steps away, causing Harry to look up and see professor Flitwick standing there with a thermos of what must have been some devilishly powerful coffee in his right hand.
“Everyone’s arguing,” Harry said as the short professor sat down next to him. “But I can only shake my head at the amount of lives wasted.”
Flitwick took a sip from his coffee, letting Harry vent.
“I don’t support the death penalty,” Harry continued. “After all, how can you know everyone you sentence to is really guilty?” He shook his head. “But what frustrates me the most. Why do we fight so much as a species? Why did the death eaters have to hurt so many people to get into this situation in the first place? Why are people still defending them, while others condemn them? Why do we hate so fucking much?”
“A fascinating question,” Flitwick said. “Unfortunately there have been many smarter heads than me who’ve discussed the very topic and been unable to come to a satisfying answer. Human nature, unequal distribution of wealth and power, a fear of the unknown, emotional immaturity. There are as many answers as there are murderers in this world I imagine.”
“Why not just leave it all,” Harry asked. “Fidelius, an abandoned island, come out to hang out with family and friends every now and again. Just become… an invisible person. Someone who doesn’t really exist. Exist for what anyway? This rotten world?”
“I don’t really believe humans have any sort of cosmic importance and that they must be preserved at all cost,” Flitwick said softly. “But I imagine if everyone did what you described then the world would be a very dreary and empty place.”
“We’re like hedgehogs, really,” Harry muttered sadly, looking at the placid lake. “We huddle together for warmth and companionship, but inevitably hurt each other with our sharp spines. You can’t have one without the other and thus we’re cursed to continue conglomerating in this complex ball of interconnected relationships that crushes us as it grows heavier, making atrocity inevitable and hatred irresistible.”
“It’s a matter of perspective, I find, teenage hormones likely don’t help,” Flitwick said with a weak chuckle. “There is good, there is bad, there is neutral. All three always exist, an ever-shifting balance dependent on outside circumstances. One thing I’ve noticed in my many years on this earth is that one thing that shifts the balance is education and empathy. When you’re smart, you know the consequences of your actions before you commit them, when you’re empathic you think about more than just yourself. In the end living life is like a democracy. Everyone casts their vote by acting a certain way and the result of that vote is the world we live in.”
“I know all these things. But feeling them?” Harry suddenly muttered. “It’s difficult to live by your beliefs, always.”
“No one said it would be easy,” Flitwick cautioned.
Harry suddenly paused, looked at the short man next to him, then threw his head back and laughed. “And no one said it would be fair,” he returned, getting a small smirk from the professor.
“The Bravest - grope a little-And sometimes hit a TreeDirectly in the Forehead-But as they learn to see-
Either Darkness alters-Or something else in sightAdjusts itself to Midnight-And Life steps into light.”
The professor recited calmly.
Harry nodded, sighed, and pulled out the sandwich again.
“Can’t really argue with that,” he complained and bit into the smoked meat, choking it down despite the protests of his body.