Next Time Around

Betrayal goes two ways

Authors note:
As the title says, betrayal can go either way. Read to find out. Oh, and there might be a slight trigger warning at the start here y'know depression and stuff. Not anything graphic or really bad though.

Disclaimer: Jk Rowling owns HP, not me...

Enjoy!

Finding out about the betrayals weighed heavily on Harry. He had a hard time seeing the fun in things and had hardly, if at all, laughed since the obliviate's were gone. His thoughts kept circling back to depressing subjects like how his best friends were only that for the money.

During one particularly dip, Harry had been found by Amun after a couple hours of searching, sitting straight and staring at nothing, silent tears streaming down his face. Amun had sat himself down next to Harry and slung his arm around him.

On another occasion, Harry had just stopped eating in the middle of a meal, sitting there with his spoon still in his hand on its way to his mouth. It had taken five minutes and some rather loud noises to get him back to semi-functional.

This went on for a while, until Sarah couldn't bear to see his self-destructive behavior anymore. She had took him by the shoulder and lightly steered him to the infirmary, where she had sat him down and had had a very frank conversation with him. It took her a while to break though the walls Harry had built up around his hurt, but in the end he did end up confiding in her. After that, even he had to admit he felt better. He was still not "ok", but that was all right, as he had never really been "ok" to start with.

Sure, it still hurt, but Harry had, with help of his Occlumency, been able to reduce the trauma and depression he was going though drastically. By now he was in a stage in which he was looking at his life analytically, without attaching feelings to his thoughts.

When he thought about it for longer, he silently berated himself for not noticing before that something was amiss in his head. There had literally been gaps in his memory and he still blindly followed Dumbledore, never once questioning his all-knowingness.

Because of his... condition, the normal schedule had been temporary abandoned and as supposed to that he had long talks and rest during the day as well as much time for sleep and alone-time. It was during one of the group talks that Harry changed his game-plan drastically.

'All right. When I go back in time, I will essentially have three choices. We already know what the Order wants me to do, but let's look at what I want to do. I can either stay light, go grey, or go dark. I know the goals of the light- integration of Muggles into Wizarding society, a ban on all things dark, and a general hatred against Voldemort, the death eaters and dark creatures-, the goals of the gray -independence,  the smallest amount of interference from the government possible, and being able to choose for yourself what you do- and the goals of the dark -having dark creatures generally accepted in society, having all magic legal, and complete separation from the Muggles or even extermination of Muggles-.

Because I think that Muggles are dangerous and attack what they don't understand, the light is -technically speaking- not even an option at this point. That leaves gray and dark. I generally agree with the dark, but that is the domain of Voldemort, and I won't bow to anyone. That means gray, right? That is against the wishes of the Order...'

'Well,' Samjeer spoke up, 'technically you could even go dark- it's not like we're not teaching you some extremely illegal stuff here. And though Voldemort is a well-known figure in the dark, it's just like with Dumbledore. There are also light families not aligned with him. So to be dark doesn't mean to bow down to Voldemort's whims. Think of Knockturn Alley. Almost all of the creatures inhabiting it are dark, but there is definitely not an excessive amount of Death Eaters living there. If you go dark what most likely will happen is a Death Eater approaching you and asking you to join, just like Dumbledore does to non-aligned light wizards. You don't have to say yes, but you do have to make sure you hold something above someone's head so that they can't force you to- and as you will have knowledge if the future, you will, believe me-.