When he tortured a cat a he was shocked that he felt sick and threw up.

When he tried to torture his cousin he was confused- why did it feel so awful, why wasn't it fun. Hadn't it always been fun?

So he tried again, but when he saw the eyes of crying child he hated himself for the first time.

So the person who had thought he was Lord Voldemort discovered he was wrong.

Lily Potter had been brilliant, but she was young and had no idea of all the ways things could go wrong when performing new complicated magics, and even if she had sometimes weird things happen.

The Horcrux was a powerful piece of soul magic, being attached to the baby it should have simply possessed it and gained complete control over the body.

But Lily's spell didn't stop the horcrux from attaching itself to Harry. And it didn't stop the consciousness attached to the horcrux from possessing the child. However it wouldn't allow Harry's soul to be pushed out, instead it dissolved the fragment of Voldemort's soul. But Voldemort's memories and beliefs stayed.

By the time Harry could walk, talk and barely start to manipulate magic there was a little boy with the soul of a Gryffindor who thought he was Lord Voldemort. But he felt sick when he tried to act like Voldemort. And he felt happy when he experimented with doing the opposite. And he soon decided being Harry, being someone with normal emotions was better than being it.

The Dursley's mistreated Harry horribly, and part of his brain screamed that they were awful muggle scum and demanded he punish them. The rest of Harry thought he deserved to treated like a house elf. After everything he'd done, he had nightmares every night in the closet where he remembered himself torturing people again and again, and enjoying it. So he quietly did what he was told, worked hard and never used magic to make it easier, and tried to feel miserable.

It was when he went to school that Harry found his ambition. He never expected the muggle library to be of much use, but it was much, much better than playing tag and digging in the sand. But the muggles - Tom had had a blind spot there, they were brilliant, always had been but far more now than ever before. Psychology and philosophy and political theory and so much more. But especially psychology, books about disorders and how emotions worked explained so much about what he had been and what he was now. Tom Riddle was a psychopath, his brain had somehow been broken and was missing so much that was important and wonderful. A sad stunted creature.

Harry though was normal, but he had been Tom, he had done those things. And he had to do something to balance it out. But more he desperately wanted Harry to be the opposite of Tom, and so he dedicated himself to making the world better in the way Tom had dedicated himself to making it worse. He'd bring happiness and tolerance in the way Tom had brought suffering and hatred. And he'd destroy everything that was left of Tom.

"Slytherin" the hat shouted seconds after it touched his head. Harry stood up and walked calmly to the table not seeing Dumbledore's unhappy look and ignoring the disappointment at the Gryffindor table or the surprise at the Slytherin table. Of course he was Slytherin, he'd been ambitious as Tom Riddle, and he was even more ambitious as Harry Potter. But it was a better ambition.

Grabbing a seat next to Malfoy's boy Harry set about subtly hinting that he was the dark lord possessing the boy's body. It was the easiest way he could think of to get access to the horcruxes it had left with Malfoy and Bella.

The diadem he'd destroy some time tomorrow, and after he got his wand during the summer he'd traveled to Gaunt shack and the cave where he'd hidden Slytherin's locket. The locket was a problem, perhaps it had been destroyed, but most likely Regulus hadn't managed it. But if Harry could arrange Sirius Black's freedom he could probably also get access to the Black ancestral home and maybe he'd then find out where the locket was if it still existed.

When the little Gryffindor girl nearly died, Harry decided to find out what had allowed the troll in. Tom Riddle had been a genius who'd learned more about the castle than almost anyone else in its long history, and drawing on that knowledge Harry was quickly able to figure out that it had been Quirrel - which was unexpected. Then it only took 4 days of using his free time and the cloak to spy on Quirrel before Harry realized what he- no it - was.

The rush of anger Harry felt was more intense than anything he ever experienced even as Voldemort, that thing was here, it was trying to kill innocent students, and it was trying to do more damage. And he was going to stop it this time, before it could hurt anyone else.

Lord Voldemort knew more about soul magic than any other living wizard, and Harry Potter had access to that knowledge. With a normal soul the idea he came up with simply wouldn't have worked, but for the mutilated damaged fragment in Quirrel's head it was easy to create a reverse horcrux ritual. Harry powered the ritual by killing Quirrel, but instead of fragmenting his own soul he used the spell to grab the fragment of Voldemort and stick it into an object which he then destroyed fifteen minutes later. Now all that was left were the three remaining horcruxes.

Harry never felt bad about Quirrel, he was dying anyways, and had willingly chosen to host it. His hands though did shake for twenty minutes after he was done.

The next man was a murderer, he'd killed dozens of non magicals, and many others. He was a nasty evil man. And he was powerful and dangerous. But he trusted Voldemort, so it was easy for Harry to get inside his wards, and catch him with his guard completely down. One spell and Lucius Malfoy was dead, and after another spell, it appeared a suicide. Harry calmly removed all signs of his presence, and carefully made sure he missed nothing before walking 20 minutes away from the mansion and apparating away.

At the funeral it hit Harry as he watched his funny and friendly (though also arrogant and mean) roommate cry over his father. It took iron control over his body to not start during the funeral, and afterwards Harry spent 20 minutes throwing up. And then he decided he was never going to kill someone again.

Sirius was the best thing to ever happen to Harry or Tom. Sirius loved him (but Harry was sure he wouldn't if he knew), and Harry had never, in either of his lives, had someone care for him. After the summer he spent with Sirius Harry came back to Hogwarts happier than he'd ever felt, and he couldn't wait to spend the next summer having even more fun. And Harry had easily gotten Kreacher to let him destroy the locket, which was the last of the horcruxes.

With Malfoy dead and the pureblood faction decapitated Harry threw himself into building connections with students of all years at Hogwarts, and through them their families. He excelled in school (but not too much, he always kept his average a bit behind Granger), and now that it was gone, permanently gone he felt free. He never learned to play around, but no longer seeing people purely in terms of how useful they were to him he started to build real friendships- something else he'd never had before.

With Draco, the image of him crying at the funeral was always in Harry's mind. So Harry tried to help Draco grow, and become a better person than his father ever had been. Draco looked up to Harry and tried to act like him, and because of his guilt Harry thought he owed it Lucius to do everything he could to make his son a good man.

Harry had really hoped Malfoy would be the last death, but in his sixth year at Hogwarts Delores Umbridge had become the power behind Fudge. She was a vicious passionate woman who'd always be a natural rallying point for purist factions. And she'd acquired power and was using it too push through horrifically discriminatory laws. Harry didn't yet have the political power to oppose her, and though he could get the media to believe lies that would discredit her she'd still be extremely dangerous.

It felt far worse than Malfoy, she wasn't a murderer, she wasn't even corrupt, just a fanatical believer in a horrible ideology. Harry spent two weeks carefully monitoring her habits, always with a sick feeling which he encouraged, believing how awful he felt was vital to maintaining his humanity. He never wanted to not care again. After two weeks Harry found the ideal way to strike, but it took three more weeks of intense work to design the needed spell.

A splinching accident, a meaningless random tragedy, but these things happened occasionally.

Amelia Bones was a genuinely good woman who Harry liked. Honest, incorruptible and capable. She ran the DMLE better than anyone had in a century, and she donated extensively to charity and always strove to be a good mentor to younger officers. But she was a traditionalist, the laws and customs had served their world well, and there was no reason to change them. Werewolves were dangerous, and the idea that people should be forced to hire them just because they spent most of the month in control of themselves was ridiculous. House elf rights were complete nonsense, actually as she'd joke to friends it was an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence. And muggleborns were perfectly fine people, but old families like her own had always run the country and usually did a good job.

Harry had built up relationships and accumulated a huge amount of wealth and in the next election would easily become the minister for magic. But while Madame Bones was there he'd never be able to start systematically passing the laws that would actually fix the magical world. She was too smart and capable for him to work around, so she needed to be neutralized.

However unlike Umbridge her threat could be destroyed without killing her, which made Harry very happy. He just had to set up a trail of false evidence and point Rita Skeeter in the right direction. A massive scandal and Madame Bones was forced to resign in disgrace. Her faction in the Wizengamot scattered and over several weeks of constantly talking Harry was able to convince the majority of them to look to him for leadership.

Harry cried for hours when three weeks later she committed suicide. But in the end he had to go on, to make a better world.

Harry had now achieved the dream he'd chased ever since he realized who he'd been and what he'd done. Things were not perfect but they were very good. Muggleborns were now truly integrated into society, their families informed when they were babies and they grew up surrounded by other magicals. They came to Hogwarts with dozens of friends and fully integrated into Wizarding culture, instead of the awkward excluded outsiders they used to be. And now with his retirement Harry was being replaced by the first muggleborn Minister for Magic, his best friend Hermione Granger She'd been closely involved with his efforts to change the magical world ever since they became close while both working in the Ministry's legal department a few years after Hogwarts, and now she'd be in charge.

Harry also had instituted careful psychological monitoring and counseling of students. It wasn't perfect but he was confident the program had caused several potential criminals to grow into healthy and fully functioning members of society. And maybe it would stop any future monsters while they were still like a young Tom Riddle and before they turned into a Lord Voldemort. Perhaps the cycle of powerful dark lords would be permanently broken.

And discrimination against sentient magical creatures had mostly ended. As a perfect example Harry was going to fulfill another old dream, replacing his unofficial uncle Remus Lupin who after twenty years in his second stint as a beloved Defense Against the Dark Arts professor was retiring.

Harry Potter felt completely at peace with himself, and no longer was haunted by the ghost of it. He'd accomplished what he set out to, and now it was time to enjoy shaping young minds and giving them tools that would keep them safe and happy as adults.