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Dark Ages	By : dime Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 1400 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Dark Ages
- 1
Many
thanks to Shivani/Grazhir and
Spellwinder for
beta-reading this and pointing out some logic issues. : )

Warning:
Contains graphic torture/violence. This is not a happy little fanfic.

Dark Ages

by Dime

"No, please! Please have mercy!!!"

Distant
laughter answered his plea and the hood over his face was given a
playful tug. He tried to stifle his groans, clamp down on his terror,
and stop the useless pleading then; all it got him was another kick
in the shins. He groaned, which earned him another pleased laugh. His
tormentors probably didn't know it, but all the bones in his legs had
long since been crushed to tiny splinters. He was no longer able to
stand on his own, probably never would be, and the knowledge was
horrible. Even though he knew perfectly well that he had no future
outside this prison camp. Though, of course, he had not seen even the
camp itself since the day he arrived.

Deprivation
of sensory input, they called it: his eyes covered by the hood pulled
so tight around his throat that breathing became an effort; his ears
covered, as well, so all sound was dimmed to near silence; nothing to
smell, not even the piss running down his legs when to his own
embarrassment he lost control of his functions after hours and hours
of standing completely still (a common means of torture when he had
still been able to stand), with his arms held out to the sides.
Though, truth to tell, he had no way of knowing just how many hours
it had been—he was not granted a sense of time, after all.

His sleep was regulated not by his inner clock, but
by when his body would shut down again. Deprivation of sleep was
another torture he was almost constantly submitted to. All of his
skin was wrapped up in clothes, the only sensory stimulations he
still got were the frequent "harmless" kicks in the shins,
or the throbbing of his arms that were tied up above his head most of
the time.

At first, he had cursed his
tormentors, had threatened dire retribution. He had still been
hopeful then. By now, he knew there was no way out for him. This hell
he was trapped in could very well be all he would know for the rest
of his life. And he yearned . . . he yearned to die.

Yet he knew he could not.

He was not allowed to die, not yet, not for a long
time. Death was not his to choose. It had to be granted, whenever
they saw fit; whenever they determined he had been punished enough.

He prayed for death. He, who had never believed in
God, never let religion or morals stand in his way, was desperately
calling to a God he knew would only condemn him to Hell for his sins.

But really, wouldn't that be
better than where he was now?

+++

Harry cried in his sleep. He sobbed; he thrashed around
and got tangled in his sheets. Sweat covered his brows, his torso,
his every inch of skin. The pillow was soaked with it - or maybe that
was from the tears spilling liberally from both his eyes. Finally,
after long minutes of suffering, he woke up and promptly emptied his
stomach all over himself.

+++

"Where
is he? Bloody hell, man, tell me! Where the fuck
have you put Voldemort?!"

Minister Scrimgeour did not know what
could possibly have happened to induce this situation, but he sure
knew he had to get himself out of it, soon. Harry Potter, adored hero
of the entire Wizarding World, was currently leaning over his desk,
holding him by the lapels of his robe and furiously shaking him while
he yelled and yelled at him. "Potter," he managed to bite
out, "unhand me this instant!"

Potter seemed to finally realize that
he was manhandling the Minister of Magic. No blush stained his
ghostly pale face at the realization, but he did let go of the
minister.

"What is all this about?"
Scrimgeour tried for a condescending tone to make up for the earlier
loss of dignity, but the slight quaver in his voice paid quit to that
attempt.

"I. Need to know. What happened
to Voldemort!" Potter snapped in barely controlled rage.

"But you do know."
Scrimgeour was honestly puzzled.

"What I know, " Potter
explained slowly as if to a small child, "is that I destroyed
all of his horcruxes save the one within me last year; that Voldemort
was captured and tried while I was out; and that he must be alive and
in prison somewhere. What I want to know is, where!"

Scrimgeour was still pretty
bewildered by the Boy-Who-Lived's odd behavior. "I assure you,
Mister Potter, that he is no longer a danger. He will pay for his
crimes against our world until the day you die, at which time we will
dispose of him also. You drained him in your last fight, Potter; he
is no longer even a proper wizard."

"I know that!"

"What
has you so concerned, then?"

Potter
closed his eyes, seemingly praying for patience. Scrimgeour was
annoyed at Potter's mannerisms, though at the same time, he
appreciated the young man trying to reign in his temper. He was not
keen on becoming a victim of the legendary Potter fits. Finally,
Potter ground out, "I want to know—need
to know!—where Voldemort is, because I had another vision."

Scrimgeour
gasped. He knew about the connection between the Boy-Who-Lived and
the Dark Lord; it had been vital to their victory in the war. Potter
had reluctantly agreed to work together with the Ministry after
Dumbledore's death. He had kept them informed of his visions.
Sometimes they had shown Potter how the Dark Lord tortured his
servants or made evil plans, but mostly Potter had had to witness the
Death Eaters' attacks on muggles, squibs and members of the Order of
the Phoenix. Had something happened to give the Dark Lord back some
of his powers? Had there been more than the horcruxes guarding him?
Was that why Potter was standing before him, pale as a ghost and
nearly out of his mind with anger and . . . was that hurt? Anxiety?
Nausea?

"Has
the Dark Lord broken free of his prison!?"

"No!"
Potter sounded increasingly annoyed, which boded ill for Scrimgeour's
re-election. Potter could easily lose him all public support. The
wizarding world viewed Potter as their sole savior and was more or
less prepared to follow where he led. It was a good thing, thought
Scrimgeour, that Potter never displayed any inclination at all to do
so.

"Voldemort
is still in that prison of yours, never fear," Potter spat. "He
couldn't get out of there even if he were still sane enough to try."

Baffled,
Scrimgeour frowned at Potter. "Then why are you upset?"

"Because
it's inhumane! I had to witness how he's treated there, and believe
me, never, in all the years of watching Voldemort commit his petty
war crimes, have I seen cruelty to rival this. It's . . . it's. . .
." Potter paled even more, a thing Scrimgeour had not believed
to be possible a minute ago, and suddenly grabbed the waste box from
under the desk. Scrimgeour disgustedly averted his nose and eyes as
Potter retched and coughed into the tiny bin.

"Not
even in the Dark Ages," Potter rasped after vanishing the mess,
"have wizards been as cruel as this. Muggles might have, I don't
know." Contrary to what students at Hogwarts were told, Potter
must have heard about the unedited History of Magic in his on-going
Auror training; for in truth, the medieval witch hunt had not been
any more harmless for magical people than it had been for those poor
muggles that had fallen prey to their peers. Only rather advanced
witches and wizards ever knew how to wandlessly freeze flames; or
apparate while bound or otherwise constrained. Even those who might
have managed an apparation despite their immobility would have run a
high risk of splinching themselves, the stress making concentration
rather impossible.

Most of
the populace indeed did burn on the pyres, drown in the rivers, or
find their end in another of the numerous ways muggles devised for
disposing of 'evil witches' back then.

The magical folk had lashed out at
muggles in retaliation and diminished their numbers by curse after
curse. The muggles called it the Pestilence.

Muggles
also to this day believed themselves responsible for the Crusades,
when actually, setting them up to slaughter each other had been a way
for the wizards to get a reprieve from the fighting against an enemy
so much stronger in numbers.

Eventually, a popular warlock had
convinced wizardkind to pull back from the muggle world completely.
Tired of the fighting and wishing for peace more than anything,
wizards and witches all over the world had quickly agreed to go into
hiding, and since then the wizarding world had kept its secrets from
the muggles and been better off for it.

"This is so much worse than
anything I've ever seen Voldemort do," Potter panted, and
Scrimgeour was shocked to see a tear trail down his deathly pale
face. "It's not just punishment for his crimes, Scrimgeour.
Please, get him out of there. Bring him back!"

"Potter! We are talking about
the man who killed your parents!"

"I know."

The minister could see how the public
would react if he denied Potter his wish, since apparently their
saviour was suffering as much from You-Know-Who's punishment as the
dark wizard himself. Still, he was not prepared to simply give in.
Not least since he had no idea what else to do with the fallen Dark
Lord.

"Albus Dumbledore."

"I know!"

"Hundreds of innocent muggles—"

Potter snorted. "Innocent my
arse!"

Scrimgeour
frowned deeply. "Potter, you can't simply assume that all
muggles are bad just because you've seen some of them acting less
than laudable. . . ."

"I
know that, too!" Potter was visibly coming to the end of his
rope, once again. "Listen, Scrimgeour. I will say this once, and
I hope we can come to an agreement. I will not tolerate
this any longer. I simply will not!
Is that clear?"

It was.

+++

"Bloody terrorists", the
soldier grumbled as he passed yet another figure clad in ragged
prisoner's garb; his round through the prison camp was uneventful as
always. He would drop a few scathing words here, trade a joke or two
with his buddies there, and finally go and bother his favorite
victim.

The soldier didn't know what the man
had done, actually. This prisoner had been picked up at the scene of
a terrorist attack and refused to breathe a word about how he got
there or even about what he did for a living. Questioning this
particular prisoner was sort of fun; instead of breaking under all
the restrictions they inflicted upon him and finally telling the
truth, the odd man had started telling the most fantastic stories.
Some of them actually made for some good entertainment, especially
since they got to punish the terrorist bastard after each of those
lies. Recently, however, the man had been talking less and less. Now,
he just screamed and begged for mercy. That was alright, though. They
could very rarely get that much of a reaction out of anyone else, so
the man was still more entertaining than most others.

Sometimes, he wondered why the man
reacted so desperately to the least punishments; a kick to the shins
was barely reason enough to howl like a beast in pain, was it? There
were guidelines, after all, as to what was allowed to be done to a
prisoner. Of course, since the man was not a prisoner of war, there
was no need to stick to the usual codes. Terrorists, and by extension
anyone suspected of terrorist activity, were outside the usual laws
according to the government. That gave them quite a wide range of
methods to choose from to break a man. Still, the boss had said to
only inflict 'minor punishments like a kick to the shins'; so, a kick
to the shin it was.

Our soldier, of course, did not do
the maths about what 'a simple kick or two' delivered to a man's legs
would do to the bones underneath if there was not one soldier, but
several, dishing out such 'harmless' punishment daily.

Whistling cheerfully, he approached
the man who was once again tied upright to the wall. Sleep was a rare
commodity for most of their prisoners. After all, the soldiers
themselves had to be constantly on alert in the war zone; why should
the bastards that had forced them into this stupid war fare any
better than them?

With
another kick to the shins, he alerted the man of his presence. A
whimper was his reward. The soldier loosened the prisoner's bindings;
the man fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes. He lay huddled in
a heap until the soldier dragged his head up. "So, ready to tell
the truth now?"

"Please,
please, oh God, don't hurt me! Please, I'll tell you anything, just
say what. . . . Oh, please.
. . !"

The
soldier was just about to give the man another kick to the legs for
good measure when a loud crack from
behind him diverted his attention.

"Crucio!"
A beam of light hit him and he fell down to the floor in unbearable
pain. It ended shortly after, leaving him a mess on the floor beside
his prisoner. He was barely coherent enough to watch a dark-haired
man in a dark coat bending down to unhood his prisoner.

"Tom.
. . . Voldemort, it's me. Harry Potter," the man said softly.

"Oh
God," the prisoner sobbed, "I am sorry for everything, but
please, please kill me
now!"

"I
cannot do that without killing myself, Tom," the man calling
himself Potter mystically answered. "Drink this; it will help."
He held an odd glass container akin to an old fashioned bottle to the
man's lips. The prisoner had difficulty swallowing, but eventually he
fell asleep in the man's arms.

Potter
straightened to several more cracks.

"Take
their memories," he instructed the new arrivals. The soldier on
the floor drifted in and out of consciousness, but it seemed to him
that a white mist was flowing from both him and his prisoner. Then,
one of the men produced a stone basin and suddenly, scenes from the
prisoner's day-to-day life were playing like a movie in the air above
the stone basin. The soldier would no doubt have admired the neat
technology were he not drawn in by the events he was witnessing.

Seen out
of context, there seemed an unreasonable amount of shin-kicking,
laughter, and begging going on. But that couldn't be right, could it?
He'd only come by once or twice a day, so it was impossible that. . .
. But no, that was Jake, not him . . . and Rob . . . and his other
buddies. . . . He had known the others also had an affinity to this
particular prisoner, but surely, they hadn't also come by every day?
Good Lord, maybe the man hadn't been faking at all. Their treatment
of him looked a whole lot worse from the outside.

Obviously,
the odd men who had just popped in were of the same opinion.

"This is outrageous!" one of them was
spluttering, while another was looking at the prisoner with pity.
"How dare those muggles treat one of us like. . . ."
another was complaining.

"Well, you did give him to
them," the man who had hurt the soldier, Potter, said in a very
resentful tone of voice. "Care to explain to me why?"

An older man looked at him
apologetically. "Arthur Weasley got one of those telly-view
things to work in his home just prior to your defeat of
You-Know-Who," he explained nervously. "He saw a report
about some island prison somewhat like Azkaban on it . . . and about
that other prison, this one here. He suggested it, said it would
serve You-Know-Who right. Remember, he killed two of the Weasleys'
sons."

+++

Yes, Harry did remember.

He also
remembered how Mister Weasley, known to all as a fanatical collector
and admirer of all things muggle, had suddenly become disenchanted
with the muggle world in the final stage of the war. Harry had
attributed it to the stress of the war against Voldemort at the time,
but he now suspected that Mister Weasley must have seen something
like what he had encountered here. . . .

"Wait. Does that mean you had
nothing to do with their behavior?"

Scrimgeour looked at him quizzically.

"No Imperio?" Harry
expanded. "No compulsion to treat this prisoner worse than the
others?"

"Well,
no. . . ."

"Does
this mean—"
Harry shot a glare at the soldier lying on the ground in front of him
"—that all the
prisoners are treated like this? Answer me, man!"

The man on
the floor gave a non-committal grunt.

Harry
shivered. Pain lashed through his body—his
or Voldemort's, he could no longer tell. Seeing his enemy's trials
and torment first in the vision, then even more of them in the
pensieve, and to feel it
all through his scar because of his proximity to the Dark Lord had
driven him to the brink of madness. "Minister, do you think such
behavior should be allowed to continue?" he asked lowly.

Scrimgeour, of course, only gave a
helpless, "Well, we don't meddle in muggle affairs since the
middle ages. . . ."

And Harry snapped.

"Maybe
it's bloody well time that changed!"

His
eyes flashing, Harry gathered his magic in his bare hands. His scar
was pulsing, his whole body was suffering from the pain and the
shame. . . . Nothing, nothing
could ever have broken Voldemort, he had thought. To see this proud
man wetting himself, crawling, begging . . . it was all too much. No
one deserved that, no one,
and it was time the muggles learned as much.

Harry
didn't care that muggle technology had advanced since the middle
ages. He didn't care that there were too few wizards to survive
another war against muggles. He didn't know that with the Weapons of
Mass Destruction currently held by most of the more 'civilized'
muggle regimes, mankind in its entirety would be wiped out if just
one of them lost his nerve in the face of a supernatural enemy. He
only cared about the injustice he saw—the
brutal lack of morals, compassion, and, not least, the utter lack of
care.

Harry was
raging. Lightning flashed and the ground was shaking. He never heard
the ministry officials disapparating. He just sank to his knees and
gathered the unconscious Voldemort up in his arms. Then he let go of
his magic.

His anger
lashed out at the muggles all around him. It tore through them,
ripping them apart like so much meat. He heard fabric being reduced
to shreds and walls collapsing.

When Harry
opened his eyes, he was standing in the middle of a deep crater. To
all sides, he could see nothing but desert. With a growl of
satisfaction, he disapparated.

And thus
the Final War between muggles and wizards had begun.

Umh, bit darker than what I usually write. Feel free
to set me straight, but that is the impression I have of recent
politics of certain superpowers... I just really, really dislike the
disbanding of basic human rights, no
matter the excuses. Howlers and other reviews very welcome.
- Dime

On a related note, you might be interested in reading
this now (though, of course, events as portrayed in this fanfiction
do not claim any resemblance to actual occurrences):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

PS: Should you decide to ask me questions in your review, please consider I can most easily answer them if you leave me a way to contact you... *rolls eyes* Duh. ^^
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Dark Ages