The Anti-Heroine || A Harry Potter Fanfiction

Chapter LXXXII

A/N: I lost a lot of inspiration for writing in general over these past six months, thanks to real world problems going on, including for this story. However! Things are starting to get better, and I've regained my inspiration. Forgive me for not updating in a small eternity and I hope you enjoy the chapter. XO

CHAPTER LXXXII:

Harry's POV:

There was a popular joke amongst the Slytherins, particularly in their year, about the "golden rule" that Hermione was always right. In reality, Harry knew that Hermione didn't actually believe that. She had no more issues than anyone else with acknowledging she was just as fallible as any other human being, and Harry was pretty sure that this was one of those times where she hadn't been 'right' at all. Instead, she'd made a horrible miscalculation, one that nobody else had managed to pick up on before it was too late, and now he had the sinking feeling the consequences were going to haunt them all.

Any time he was forced to spend in unfortunately close proximity with Fred and George Weasley as the days in Grimmauld Place dragged by managed to trigger every single primal instinct for recognising danger that Harry had. There was something just so deeply off about the twins these days. Something far more than just the aftermath of Fred's disfigurement and the complications that had come along with it. They were... he wasn't quite sure how to describe it, that unsettling sense of 'wrongness' about them. Charlie had commented on it, a frown on his face as he did so, and Tonks had started eyeing them both in that predatory way of hers. He recognised it from when Tonks spotted someone who set off her "danger" radar– it was the same look she gave Voldemort, Snape, Remus, Fleur, Moody, Dumbledore, Tom and Hermione. They were just wrong– eerily so. And Harry had a sinking feeling as to why.

Unicorn blood had seemed like such a bloody fantastic idea at the time. A cursed half-life was something he'd had no hesitation in sentencing the twins to, not after they'd nearly killed Hermione by sending her tumbling down those stairs. But giving the twins something that drained their emotions from them, that turned their lives dull and grey, when they'd already proven they were capable of such violence and disregard for human life? Well, Harry was growing more and more certain that they had made a terrible mistake.

The effects of the unicorn blood was detaching the twins from the anchors of their family, the people they loved and the daily activities they took pleasure in doing; it was stripping the humanity from them, more and more each day, and Harry was genuinely afraid of what they'd be capable of without it– their hatred of him and Hermione certainly hadn't faded even slightly. He really had a terrible, terrible feeling that he and Hermione had turned the twins into a pair of psychopaths who hated them and wanted them dead. Understandably, he'd been going out of his way to avoid them– Moody too. Grimmauld Place was filled with rooms that he could hide away in, thankfully, plus having Kreacher's loyalty meant having access to the fascinating treasures hidden away by the Blacks that the invading Order didn't know existed. 

Along with the assigned reading materials from Walburga's lessons as the Black Matriarch dragged him up to her standards and held him to them by the throat, Kreacher had been bringing him a variety of books that the elf had hidden away from the Order when Dumbledore's flock first invaded Grimmauld Place. Apparently, these rare and dangerous books had been in the possession of the Black family for hundreds upon hundreds of years, some of them ancient and in languages indecipherable to him, others translated copies, all of them foul in a way that made his skin crawl even as he eagerly absorbed the words, looking for the answers he was seeking.

It was in a grimoire written on what he suspected was human skin, probably muggle, with blood that he suspected was human too, that Harry finally found the answers he'd been looking for; an explanation of what a Horcrux was, beyond all the vague, not-actually-an-explanation explanations he'd gotten from Tom and Marvolo and Voldemort, and the handful of brief mentions he'd found in various other Dark Arts books.