Systemic Causation

Chapter One

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter. If I did we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Author's Note: Thanks to everyone who took the time to review, alert and fave! Here's the next installment, please enjoy!

There are some things you never forget. Luckily for Harry, his quality family bonding time was not one of those things. In fact he was pretty sure than remembering more than the occasional snippet would break his brain and leave him a drooling catatonic mess.

He came back to himself, naked and sweating in the uncharacteristically dry heat in a small wood north of London. Blood was drying on his ghost-pale skin and there were still gobbets of what remained of Bambi's mum stuck in his teeth.

He promptly bent over and threw up what was, judging from the carcass gathering flies, about half a full grown deer. Then continued to dry heave at the stench of his own vomit until he pulled himself together enough to stagger into a nearby stream and scrub the blood, and probably a couple layers of skin, away with handfuls of coarse sand.

He sat there in the stream. Bare-arsed and shivering for a good long while sorting out what he remembered from what he hopefully never would.

He remembered Voldemort's rebirth with near-perfect clarity right up until the moment he was dragged into the misty place by the wreck. Then things were either hazy and fogged out or a pit of not-there he wasn't keen to poke at.

He did know a few things with some certainty. Like that sitting still in the stream was a bad plan. He was still connected to the mental web that was the wreck, just doing his best to hide his mind from theirs. So far it was working but it was better to be on the move. Escaping them once had been difficult. If they caught him he doubted he could do it again.

Firstly though he needed clothes, if only so he could move around without the muggles noticing his pasty ass and attempting to haul it in for indecent exposure. Some food that wasn't raw venison might go over well too since his stomach was complaining about his earlier bout of impracticality.

In a swirl of silver fog he phased out of the wood and into London proper. Perching in the shadows of the roof of a tall building and surveying the city below him. Watching as the muggles scurried to and fro as the shadows of twilight lengthened. A herd of bleating, blissfully oblivious sheep, unaware of the wolves that lurked among them, around them, above them, just waiting to tear them limb from limb. Harry shook his head, now wasn't the time for that.

Clothes, then food.

He phased again into the curtained off section that served as a change room in the second hand store where his aunt had purchased everything that he owned that wasn't some cast-off of Dudley's. He moved the curtain aside an inch with one finger and looked out into the storefront. There were no customers and the cashier, a skinny guy with enough acne for ten teenagers, was absorbed with some sort of hand-held video game. There was only one camera and it was pointed at the register and cashbox. Perfect.

Harry slipped out of the change room, his bare feet making no noise on the cheap linoleum floor. He picked up a pair of jeans that he thought were his size only to frown as he held them up to his hips and found they only hit the bottom of his calf. It took a bit of digging but finally he found a pair that was long enough for his legs and small enough that they didn't fall straight down, though they did rest alarmingly low on his hips. Beggars and thieves couldn't afford to be choosy. He shrugged to himself pulling on a too big Mickey Mouse t-shirt that had once been blue and was now a sad shade of grey. He passed over the trainers that reeked of feet and cheap deodorizer and grabbed a pair of black boots with cracked and peeling leather instead.

He was out of the store without anyone being the wiser and feeling marginally more human. After all there was only so much like a human you could feel when you were part nightmare monster, part wizard cliché.

There was a McDonalds a block up the street that smelled of hamburgers and grease and Harry made a beeline for it.

In stark contrast to the second hand store the McDonalds was packed with people. Wall to wall of shouting, screaming, whining, crying, complaining, bleating, milling sheep. Harry almost turned around and walked right back out the door but he was hungry. His mouth watered at the thick scent of heart-attack inducing deliciousness and rather than turning and leaving, he ventured further into the store, manfully ignoring the twitch in his shoulders every time someone brushed too close.

It was easy to take someone else's order in this chaos. He'd watched it happen half a dozen times before. Pick a distracted mark, like the red-head on her cell-phone who let her equally redheaded spawn run wild. Wait near the counter, listening carefully.

"I've got a McChicken and two Hamburger Happy meals for Sally!" called the annoyed looking manager at the hand-off, scowling out at the crowd.

Harry moved forward to grab the warm paper bag. The manager eyed him suspiciously.

"You Sally?" she asked with obvious skepticism.

"We're together," croaked Harry in the voice of a man three times his age who'd chain smoked and swallowed razorblades all his life.

Ouch, okay, talk about your extreme case of disuse. How long had it been since he'd spoken?

Harry flashed the woman a black grin and she quickly released the bag letting her eyes slide past him and turning to the next receipt in front of her.

See no evil. Hear no evil.

Have no fun.

Harry would have laughed but he didn't want to send the milling cattle into a stampede in the middle of this confined space.

He couldn't stay here anyway. The masses helped to hide him from the wreck but it wouldn't be long before they found his trail. What he really needed was to get behind a good set of wards, find out how long he'd been gone for and plan his next move.

He grinned a vengeful grin, turned a corner into an alleyway and swirled out of existence, reappearing in the kitchen at Number Four Privet Dr. He couldn't linger in the misty place, out of phase and watching, because of the wreck but when he arrived no one was in the kitchen, so Harry sat down at the breakfast bar to eat his pilfered fast-food before he had to deal with the Dursleys.

He shouldn't have been surprised that it was Dudley that found him first. His cousin was many unpleasant things but when there was grease and nitrates involved he had the nose of a basset hound.

Dudley didn't notice him right away. Still large but now with a bit of muscle on him rather than being all flab, his cousin paused in the kitchen frowning. Harry watched, eyes tracking, lips twitching as he held back a mocking smile, as Dudley looked around the kitchen proper, confused, then he turned around fully and started at the dark ragged figure perched almost delicately on the bar stool.

"MUM! DAD!" he shouted almost reflexively, there was a loud crash from upstairs and the pounding of running feet, "Who the hell are you?" Dudley demanded putting up his fists like a boxer.

"I'm hurt, cousin," laughed Harry in a jagged cracking voice, "Have you forgotten me already?"

That gave him pause. He stared hard at Harry, his brow furrowed in concentration.

"Cousin?" he muttered, squinting his beady little blue eyes, "Potter? Is that you? What the bloody fuck is wrong with your eyes?"

Vernon and Petunia came barrelling into the kitchen just then. Petunia took one look at him and let out a choked off scream of pure terror, trying to scramble backwards and blocking Vernon's entrance in the process.

She knew. She'd seen.

No. Harry dismissed the idea almost as soon as it had formed. If she'd seen, truly seen, she would have known, and the reaction would have been a hundred times worse. No, she'd heard from someone who had truly seen. The same way Lily must have.

Vernon shoved her out of his way and she hit the doorframe and collapsed there her eyes still fixed on Harry shaking like a leaf as she tried desperately to draw in more air.

Harry flashed her a smile, one that said, I know you know. You've always known haven't you? And, perhaps most importantly, I don't forgive you.

"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Vernon in a booming furious voice, his face turning that ridiculous shade of puce that said many things about his blood pressure.

"It's the freak," said Dudley, he flashed his father's back a quick glare for the harsh handling of his mother.

"You've got a lot of nerve, boy, turning up here after all the trouble you—"

"Hold your tongue, meat, or I'll rip it out," said Harry lazily.

"You dare to threaten me—"

Harry was up out of his seat and, in seconds, Vernon was on the floor howling as blood poured from his mouth. Harry tossed the spongy bit of muscle into the sink and flicked the worst of the blood and spittle off of his hand and onto his aunt's near sterile floors.

Petunia screamed again, loud and shrill, and Dudley howled "Dad!" his skin turning greenish grey as he fought the urge to vomit. Vernon for his part was on his hands and knees a puddle of blood forming on the floor as he made wounded gargling noises and the blood poured from his parted lips.

Dudley let out a cry of reckless rage and took a fairly decent swing at Harry, he'd been practicing. Not bothering to phase, Harry ducked under the blow with a liquid swiftness that was well on its way to inhuman. He grabbed a hold of his cousin's over-extended arm by the wrist pulled him close and planted a knee in his gut. Winded Dudley doubled over and Harry pulled his arm straight gripping it by the wrist and bicep before breaking it over his knee like a dead branch.

Both bones in the forearm snapped like twigs contorting Dudley's arm into a gruesome, pseudo s-shape. All the breath taken out of him from Harry's first blow, Dudley couldn't do no more than utter a panicked wheeze and fall to his knees staring at his arm with horror. This time he actually did vomit.

Harry wrinkled his nose, both at the stench and the sight of the kitchen.

They hurt you, whispered a mental voice that was partly his own and partly under the influence of the wreck, they hurt you for years, the least you could do is return the favour.

Harry shook his head to clear it. The Dursleys weren't worth the time and effort it would take to make a proper game of them. Also, the human half of Harry was trying to remind him that the kind of blood-soaked fun and games he was thinking of were wrong and he shouldn't be playing them. Shouldn't even want to be playing them.

He cursed under his breath and grabbed the back of both Vernon and Dudley's shirt collars dragging them into the misty place with him for a brief moment as he disappeared from the kitchen in a swirl of silver fog. They reappeared in his old bedroom. Stripped and decontaminated of anything that he could have come into contact with it was bare except for a discarded bucket of cleaning supplies and the bars were still on the windows, the bolts on the doors. Perfect.

Feeling a smidge guilty, just a smidge, mind, about the damage done Harry casually tossed a number of clean towels from the linen closet across the way into the room with his uncle and cousin then he turned and left throwing all seven deadbolts behind him.

When he returned to the kitchen he was unsurprised to see that his aunt hadn't moved from her spot collapsed in a heap in the doorway her nails scratching furrows in the neat white paint of the trim as she shook and shuddered. The kitchen stank far too strongly of fear, vomit and blood for Harry's taste so he hauled Petunia upright by her arm, dragged her limp and mostly unresisting form into the living room, dumped her on the couch and shut the door.

"Now auntie dearest, I think it's time that you and I had a chat," Harry said crossing the room to lean against the fireplace, "Answer my questions and I'll let you leave here alive, understand? Good. Let's start with the basics, you know what I am, right?"

Petunia stared at him, wide-eyed and near hyperventilating, she nodded her head a couple of times very fast.

"Yviczhe," she croaked, her human throat struggling to wrap her voice around a word that tasted of blades and screeches.

"Yviczhe," agreed Harry pleasantly even as she flinched, the word stabbing at her human ears like needles.

The pronunciation still wasn't quite right, but his vocal cords weren't well adapted for speaking the proper language of the wreck.

"How do you know of them? Who told you?"

"The family," Petunia said her voice quavering, "They all hunted things, all sorts of horrible monstrous things. Mother was the only one who didn't. She married father, a doctor, right out of school because she didn't want to go into the family business. They all told stories though, to Lily and I, when Mother wasn't paying attention or they got enough drink into them."

"They all died."

Petunia nodded squeezing her eyes tightly shut and shuddering violently.

"Lily went to the Yviczhe."

"The war," squeaked Petunia, starting to wring her hands, silent tears and drips of snot running down her face, "Mother and Father were tortured and killed by the fr— the magic lot. Lily. She wanted revenge. Wanted it desperately. I didn't know. I stopped speaking to her. I couldn't have known—"

Petunia swallowed another stream of screaming words at Harry's warning look. Her nails bit into the tops of her hands but she didn't seem to notice as she wrung them faster and harder.

"So she bred herself a weapon. Promised the wreck a male yviczhe, half-bred and tainted but male nevertheless, and the wreck agreed because you can't make murderous spawn with an all-girl team."

"I don't know. I don't know. There was a letter—it explained, but I don't know what she did. I never wanted this. I never asked for this. I don't—"

Harry cut her off.

"Why you?" he demanded sharply, "Why here?"

"L-lily did something, some magic trick, to keep them out. The—the Yviczhe. There was a note—I couldn't. I can't. I—"

She broke down sobbing buried her face in a throw cushion and rocking back and forth.

"The wards were tied to you when Lily died to keep Voldemort from killing me as a baby. She knew she was dead anyway, the Yviczhe wouldn't let her live when they had me in their grasp, but with ancient blood magic she could erect a set of wards that would keep them from getting at me as long as I lived under your roof. Wards that wouldn't fade until after I was fully grown and had fulfilled my purpose and destroyed Voldemort and his Death Eaters," Harry said speaking more to himself now than her.

A violent shuddering sob wracked her boney frame. Harry looked down at her. Petunia Evans Dursley was guilty of being a prejudiced bitch but knowing what he knew he could see she'd been far kinder than he would have been in her place. She hadn't brought any of this upon herself, really. She was just related to the wrong people. Harry could almost find it in him to pity her. Almost. He took her by the hair and tossed her into the room with her husband and son alive and unharmed as promised.

The full picture was starting to form.

Harry had known, it would have been impossible not to know actually with the wreck screeching the truth into his ears and mind, that his mother had made him from the blood of the Yviczhe, carried him in her own womb and ensconced them both behind the Fidelius Charm as well as the best wards she and James could conjure. The wreck had been furious that she'd stolen what was rightfully theirs, the answer to all their problems, and then, when the wards finally did fall, they couldn't take him because of Lily's fresh sacrifice. Then wards were built around that and the living Petunia and to a lesser extent Dudley.

They'd waited and waited as the wards became thinner every year. Watching as he grew and matured, showing uncommon patience they'd waited until he was unprotected and—

Harry refused to let his mind go there, biting down on his tongue savagely to return his thoughts to the present. He'd only just managed to regain his self-awareness, he wasn't keen on reverting to running through the woods bare-arsed and chowing down on raw meat so soon.

Harry had a good idea about just who had built the wards. Dumbledore. The headmaster couldn't defeat Voldemort himself and he would have well known it by that point. The question was how had the old man managed to get Lily to abandon all her good sense and make him a weapon capable of such a thing?

He would have to pry the details from the old goat eventually and he was really, really looking forward to the prying part of that conversation.

With the Dursleys taken care of for the time being Harry vaulted over the banister and landed in a crouch on the main floor grabbing Vernon's discarded newspaper from the coffee table.

August 6th.

He'd been gone for two months then in this dimension.

The misty place was out of phase with this plane though so that didn't really tell him how long the wreck had, had him in their serrated copper claws.

Frustrated, Harry threw the paper back down and phased back upstairs into the bathroom for a long hot shower. It was there, stripping off his pilfered clothes, that he got his first proper look at himself.

His hair was long, he'd noticed that absently already, inky black with ragged ends but silky fine and clingy enough that it stayed tucked neatly behind his ears it brushed his bare shoulder blades and highlighted the impossible paleness of his skin. Beyond his head though his body was nearly completely hairless, his eyebrows and eyelashes thin and fine. He ran calloused long-fingered hands down his abdomen tracing a set of long ropy scars that raked from ribs to hip. There were many, many more of them, scars, but these stood out starkly. He'd been nearly disembowelled at some point.

He was quite a bit taller, five foot ten or eleven at a guess, and so thin. His body had been reduced to skin stretched over whipcord lean muscle and protruding angular bone. His fingernails were thick and tinted copper and when he bared his teeth at the mirror he noticed that his canines and his pre-molars were slightly longer and a great deal more pointed then they had been. The most striking change was of course his eyes. He hadn't needed his glasses to see clearly since the graveyard and they glared, unobstructed, at the mirror in a sullen rusted scarlet.

The hair, the changes in his physique and the sudden dramatic increase in height told the story. He'd been in the misty place at least a year but given how short he'd been before Harry suspected it was far longer, perhaps as long as two or three years. He didn't know how to tell for certain though.

First thing was first, getting rid of the damn hair.

Harry left the bathroom and hunted down a pair of sharp scissors and Vernon's electric shaver, the tickling feeling of the hair swirling around his neck and shoulders sharp and annoying. He hacked off the whole length of it as close as he could get to the base of his skull with the scissors and dropped it into the sink. It fell forward in front of his face now, clinging to his jaw, and that was almost even more annoying. Harry knew he couldn't just shave the whole lot of it off. Not only would he look like an escaped cancer patient or a younger, prettier version of Voldemort but then he would have no way of hiding his most famous scar. He was also vain enough to admit to not wanting to look like something had been chewing on his head.

Carefully Harry shaved the back of his head until only soft, ink-colored fuzz remained. He then used the scissors to get as close a cut as possible to the top and sides of his head. He was half-way done when he paused considering his reflection. It didn't look half bad with his hair slanted heavily across his face, obscuring his scar and one of his eyes. Harry trimmed it down carefully so that the longest edge of his fringe brushed his eyelids but didn't obscure his vision and then left it as it was. He was fairly sure he'd once seen someone with a similar haircut.

He shrugged. It looked fine, no longer annoyed him and covered the scar. He turned the shower on to scalding hot and while the water was warming took a moment to brush and floss his teeth. There was nothing worse than breath that reeked of rancid blood and rotting meat. He would know.

He stepped into the shower with a low groan of content his milky skin flushing an angry dark pink in seconds. He washed his hair and watched as loosened bits swirled away with the foam down the drain. He stayed in the shower until the water began to run cold and his skin was starting to wrinkle and even then he was reluctant to get out. Hot water running over his back and shoulders and being truly clean were both wonderful sensations.

He stepped out of the shower careful to avoid the hair clippings all over the floor. An entire childhood of habit and conditioning nagged at him to clean it up but Harry was feeling rather exhausted so he left the mess, towelling himself dry.

He paused at his former door. Petunia was talking in a hysterical crooning whisper, Dudley was whimpering and it seemed Vernon had passed out from shock or blood loss though he was still breathing.

That ascertained, he padded down the hall to the guest bedroom and slipped naked between the crisp sheets that smelled of nothing more horrifying than fabric softener and wash powder.

He was asleep in minutes.

AN: There you have it folks. Hope you enjoyed!

Still not sure of the pairing so I'm opening the subject up for voting. Tell me what you guys want to see, keeping in mind that this story is most definitely slash. I should say that I won't under any circumstances be pairing Harry with Snape, Death Eaters, Ron, or Voldemort.

Alright guys that concludes our story for the moment, please type a little something in the box below, it'll make my day!

Til next time.