162 Chapter 162: Unmasked

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I would like to thank my beta, Akisu, for his help in this chapter.

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31 October 1993, Hogsmeade

One thing was missing though. When Harry peered towards his downed opponent, he froze as he recognized their unmasked face looking back at him.

It was hard to describe what was beneath the killer's mask outside of it being monstrous. The twisted face that Harry now stared at was a mix of horror and strangely enough, familiarity, a blend that sent a chill down his spine. The left side of the attacker's face could have been considered handsome, obviously, a male face, with sharp cheekbones and a strong jawline that spoke of noble heritage, marred only by a single scar that cut a thin white line across the olive skin. However, the right side was a stark, nightmarish contrast; it was a ravaged landscape of flesh that spoke of dark curses and deeper pains.

The skin—if one could still call it that—resembled the remnants of parchment left too long in a fierce flame, edges curled and blackened, but held together by some eldritch force. It seemed to writhe and twitch with a life of its own as if the ash was struggling to flee the monster it was a part of. This damaged skin—or what replaced skin—seemed to pulse faintly with a sickly glow, giving the impression of embers that refused to die.

His eye on the affected side was a pale, lifeless orb, milky in appearance, and stared forward with an unsettling emptiness, providing no hint of vision or soul. It was surrounded by what looked like fissures, where the skin had split and folded, creating valleys and ridges that seemed to mock the very concept of human anatomy. A few strands of what was once hair clung to the scarred scalp, brittle and ashen, like remnants of a scorched tapestry.

The other eye, the one not ravaged by whatever malevolence had befallen him, was a stark and haunting grey. It was a whirlpool of storms, the kind that had seen too much and forgotten nothing. There was just something strangely familiar about those eyes.

Below that dichotomy of eyes lay a nose that seemed to have been broken and poorly reset multiple times, giving it a crooked and jagged appearance, only adding to the asymmetry of his features. His lips were uneven, the one on the undamaged side curved in what could have been a smirk in another life, while the other was a stretched taut line, barely containing the teeth that seemed too white, too sharp.

His breath came in ragged gasps, and even that seemed a miracle that such a desecrated body could hold life. There was just something familiar about the man, something that Harry couldn't put his finger on.

The man giggled in madness, seemingly happy with Harry's speechlessness "Unsettling, isn't it? There is a reason I wear a mask."

"There's something familiar about you. Who are you?"

That seemed to amuse the man further, "A shard of the past, a forgotten remnant of a tragic era."

"What the fuck happened to you? You were human once, I can tell, not whatever abomination you became."

The man started to giggle, "What happened to me, you say? Why your bitch of a mother happened to me!" He was growling by the end of the sentence.

"What the fuck is with you guys and my mother. First Lupin and now, you."

The deranged man stopped laughing when he heard Lupin's name, stiffening in surprise, until he forced himself into that persona again, "Because Lily was at the centre of it all. Who would have thought that perfect little Lily Evans, the girl who stood up to Purebloods far more influential than she ever could be with a spine of steel, the girl who wrapped half her professors around her fingers by her first years, the girl who fought against injustice, would have been a monster all along. It was all a mask, just like mine. She had everything she could have ever wanted lined up, but she chose to become a monster, to betray everyone."

"Betray who?"

"The Order, her friends, her husband, the cause, everyone. What she did in Godric's Hollow was so monstrous that I doubt the darkest wizards would ever do anything like it."

A realization came across Harry's mind, "You were there. You were at Godric's Hollow that night."

"You're looking at the only survivor of your mother's flames, boy. I am the only one who knows about what she really did that day. How does it feel to have a mass murderer as a mother? Your mother spilt more blood that day than Voldemort ever did."

Harry simply shrugged, "I don't really care, to be perfectly honest."

That seemed to take the wind out of the sails of the downed man, "You don't care? Your mother massacred thousands of innocents, muggles and mages alike. She destroyed even more lives, made orphans of children, and widowers of husbands and wives, because of her selfishness. And you're not ashamed to have someone like that as a mother?"

"Why would I be? Why would I care about some dead woman's actions? They're not mine and they don't affect me. At least, they didn't until you came. And for all your outrage against her, for all your anger and hatred, you don't care about the victims either. Everything you're doing is personal. You feel betrayed. You feel wronged. You knew her, or at least, you thought you knew her, and she failed you. You must have been close, very close for that betrayal to hurt you so much."

With every one of Harry's words, the killer was getting progressively more furious. The visual cues were very easy now that he was unmasked, and Harry could easily read his expressions to see if his guesses were correct or not. He kept on going until the man simply couldn't handle it anymore and threw his enchanted knife at Harry's head.

This knife was enchanted and cursed with enough magic that could go through most magical shields, even physical ones, yet Harry was unconcerned. With a flick of his wand, space bent around him, making the knife literally go around him instead of hitting him. It was a variation of the expansion charm that he adapted into a shield. It wasn't perfect and it was very draining, but it was a spell that Harry was proud of.

The man's miss seemed to dishearten him even further, and Harry just went with the kill, "Isn't that right, Sirius Black?"

It was easy to deduce his identity from the clues. The anger was too raw, too outraged. Adding in the familiar colour of the man's eyes, it was elementary.

The monster in human skin looked back at Harry and burst into laughter. It wasn't pretty, it was just deranged, "Isn't that cute, little Potty finally figured it out. Do you like what you see? Do you like what your mother turned your dear old godfather into?"

"I can't say that it's your best look," Harry replied, with a dry humour that felt oddly misplaced in the grim setting. He knew enough about Sirius Black's personality to know that this was the best way to get answers.

Sirius' face, even in its grotesque state, seemed to twist into a crazier grin if that was possible. His good eye sparkled with that same stormy grey, a hurricane of fury and glee. Sirius's posture changed; he sat up straighter as if the revelation had breathed new life into his mangled body, "You're funnier than I thought you would be. That's me, your godfather, in the flesh – well, what's left of it anyway."

"Look, I know that my mother hurt you…"

"You think this is about me, Harry?" Sirius' voice was a growl, a sound that seemed to scrape the edges of the chaos within him and spread it into the air. "You think I'm just a man scorned? You have no idea. Your mother..." He spat the words out like venom. "I trusted her. We all trusted her. We were fighting side by side for years and when Death Eaters attacked Godric's Hollow, we all fought together as we always did. We knew that we were probably going to die that night. There were just too many of them, practically whatever remnant there was of Voldemort's army that wasn't already arrested. It was just me, your mother, and your father against a hundred wizards and witches, and dozens of werewolves. We were fighting with everything. Bellatrix had just summoned some kind of uncontrollable Fiendfyre. We were ready to shield against it but imagine my shock when your mother just took a ritual knife and stabbed James in the heart."

The ashes around his face seemed to agitate the more he spoke, "He was my brother, my best friend, and he was betrayed by a woman he loved over everything. The worst thing was that a ritual like hers had to be prepared. She planned on killing James to power a ritual before they were even attacked, a betrayed love is a very powerful catalyst for any magic. And she killed him, just like that. His love for her was so grand, so powerful, that it literally blew the Fiendfyre away and razed the entire village to the ground. She did all of that for you. What a joke!"

Harry's mind was still processing this. It wouldn't make any sense to take the obviously deranged man's word for it. Instead, he simply asked, "And how did you survive?"

Sirius' laughter this time was a crescendo of madness, starting low and building up into a howling cackle, "Who said anything about me surviving? I died, just like the rest, I just didn't stay dead. At that moment, I hated your mother so much that I refused to leave. I fought with every fibre of my body trying to get back at the bitch who killed my brother. I vowed to take away everything that she loved, just as she did to me."

Harry hummed, "So, you're essentially a ghost but instead of leaving traces of your personality, your very soul was stuck somewhere. Whatever my mother had done must have made it possible somehow, a weird form of soul magic that allows you to project yourself into reality. So that's how you're phasing through things, that's why you have no magic, you're a portal to something, a place without magic that sucks everything in, hence the magical resistance. A different plane of existence, perhaps, where you can only materialize in a single plane at once. I didn't think that was possible."

Sirius snorted bitterly, "Look at you! You sound just like her. You don't care, do you? About what happened? It took me some time to learn that I wasn't a ghost. I saw a lot. I saw Dumbledore's lies, that the world he spoke about was just a scam to lure people in. That's when I realized that they're all the same. Dumbledore, Voldemort, your mother. You. All of you speak pretty words, promises of better futures, of better lives, and make people follow you. For the first time in my life, my eyes were opened, and I vowed to change it, to burn every remnant of you monsters from the world. I will be the one to reset the balance, to tip the scales so that justice can truly be served. The silent guardian, the dark knight, killing the schemers like you, like Dumbledore, like Lily."

"And what about the causalities of your little crusade? What about the people that will oppose you?"

"They will burn, just as I burned and they'll see the truth just as I did," the man's eyes were manic in excitement which made the young Slytherin uncomfortable.

Harry regarded Sirius with clinical coldness, the way one might study an interesting but dangerous specimen behind protective glass. "You're insane."

His statement was clinical, and factual, which didn't leave any room for compromise.

Sirius leaned forward, the charred skin of his face cracking with the movement. His expression turned to that of a very disturbed grin, "You're just getting that now?"

Harry stood unflinchingly as Sirius' laugh, jagged and broken, filled the room again. He needed to understand the complete picture, to see where the puzzle pieces fit, and for that, he had to let Sirius talk. "So, that's it? That's your grand plan. Kill enough people and just watch the world burn. You don't really expect that to work, do you?"

"Maybe not," Sirius said, a grotesque smile spreading across the half of his mouth still capable of it. "But it's better than letting this grotesque world exist. The world is sick, poisoned by power and lies. It's in dire need of correction. I'll burn it all down, and maybe, from the ashes, a new, world will rise. One without lies, without masks..."

Harry's expression didn't waver, though inside, his mind was racing. He had to keep Sirius talking, keep him from realizing that Harry was analyzing his every word, every gesture. "And if nothing happens? If the next world is not up to your standards? What if there isn't a next world at all? What if all that's left is just ashes?"

Sirius' eye flared, and his voice was a venomous hiss. "Then I'll burn it again and again until I get the world I want. And if that's impossible, then maybe the world deserves to be destroyed…"

There was something profoundly tragic about the man before Harry. A man reduced to a twisted shadow, driven by the pain of betrayal and loss, warped into something unrecognizable, something inhuman.

"The question that comes to mind now is how does killing me help with any of that?" Harry simply questioned.

"You're the key, Lily's backup plan…"

Before the man could continue, an exploding spell hit Sirius in the head, sending him flying away, "That's enough, Padfoot."

Harry turned and saw the familiar figure of Remus Lupin looking far more feral than he ever was in class, his wolf howling in the night.

Sirius quickly got up with a snarl, "Moony. I've been meaning to give you a visit. How nice of you to spare me the effort."

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I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.

Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.