Black Fortunes

Chapter 1

Harry James Potter stared around himself with blank emerald eyes. Nothing had been worth this. Hogwarts was an empty shell, more than half of it was destroyed, the rest was uninhabitable ruins. Everybody he knew was dead, practically. The only ones left beside himself were Charlie Weasley, locked in a coma after the death of his entire family, Kingsley Shacklebolt, blind and unable to hear in his left ear, and Neville Longbottom, beside his parents in St. Mungo's thanks to the Lestrange brothers, who had driven him insane after he slaughtered Bellatrix in the final battle.

In his hands he held a single object, a mirror. Twin to the one he had shattered after Sirius' death, it was once perhaps a beautiful object. Now, stained by blood and dirt from his hands, it was something unrecognizable. He stared at the man in the mirror, unable to recognize himself, let alone the mirror. He had a scar across the left side of his face, courtesy of an exploding metal bar. His skin was pallid after spending nearly two years hiding underneath the school in the Chamber of Secrets, and he was thin, more so than Sirius after 12 years unjustly imprisoned.

Now that he thought about it, actually, the Black family had gotten quite the racket. Sirius was dead after being in Azkaban, and Andromeda and her family had been murdered by Death Eaters since she had 'spoiled her purity' by marrying a Muggleborn. Bellatrix had been driven insane by her husband and the Dark Lord she had been pressed into serving so blindly. Regulus had been dragged underwater and drowned by Inferi, and Narcissa and Draco had been killed for Lucius' second failure in the war, not that Harry grieved for Narcissa.

He had honestly grieved for Draco Malfoy, however. The young man hadn't known what he was getting himself into; all he wanted was to please his exacting and demanding Mother. Lucius hadn't been guilt-free in raising his son either, but from what Harry knew, most of it had been Narcissa's fault. Draco had lost everything, including his life, because he was afraid to stand up for himself and possibly disappoint his family.

Even Orion Black had suffered. Harry hadn't known Sirius' father, but he did know that the man had been forced into a betrothal contract with his own cousin, a cold shrew of a woman who couldn't have been easy to live with. Sirius hadn't spoken much of his father aside from a paranoia about Muggles, but that could have easily come from ignorance and family traditions. The fact that he hadn't spoken much about the man was in his favor, it meant that he hadn't been one to punish Sirius or his brother often.

Suddenly hit by the injustice of everything that had been dealt to the magical world and the Black family in general, Harry yelled in fury and threw the mirror away from himself. It struck a tree, shattering into a few hundred fragments of glass and larger chunks of metal.

Struck by a dizzy spell, he leaned forward, closing his eyes. As the world began to swirl around him in a haze of color, and he was slowly falling unconscious, the last thought that struck him was a humorous I guess there is some truth to that adage about breaking mirrors.

All credits go to J. K. Rowling and Herald_of_Dreams (AO3). This is not my work, it is just a repost of the work by Herald_of_Dreams on AO3 and by Herald-MageAnduli on fanfiction.net.