So now enter his two sidekicks who saw him practicing his "dark" spells. True, some were more than illusions. Once a fiend was down, Harry intended for them to stay down. For good. Ron of course immediately accused him of turning dark and while Hermione was at first unconvinced, she ultimately sided with Ron and expressed her opinion of her not wanting to see him turn dark and that he should talk to Dumbledore about all this. Maybe find a way stop his soul turning black.
Maybe Harry could have handled the situation better but when he had been training every day for over a year to make sure his friends would live to see their 18th birthday, only to have them call him a dark s-o-b wizard, he ripped them each a new one and left them to stew in their own thoughts while he got back to work. Days later Hermione gave him a half-assed attempt at an apology which he never really accepted since she was only saying it to gain his friendship back, not that she was convinced he wasn't turning dark. She continued to try to get him to renounce his dark ways for the next several weeks until he told her to go stuff herself.
Meanwhile, Ron was having his own hissy-fit and not speaking to Harry yet again. Harry had been down this road too often with his prat of a friend so he simply told himself he was washing his hands of any sort of friendship the jerk cared to offer. Both of them were surprised to find out Harry was dating Ginny during the Christmas holiday. There were more harsh words on Ron's part to Ginny then, but she told him what Harry had told Hermione: to go stuff himself.
The Christmas holiday had its moments of good time and bad. Good was with Ginny. Bad was with Hermione and Ron, so he avoided them during the break as much as possible. Once school resumed Albus had noticed the split between friends and attempted to get them to reconcile. Harry wasn't having any of it. He no longer felt the pressing need to have their friendship, fickle as it was. January slid into February and Harry proposed marriage to Ginny. A curse had cut her down later that day and by day's end he had exacted his revenge on the dark jerk that had ruined his life.
The next day Hermione and Ron finally apologized for thinking he was dark. Numb, he didn't rebuke them. He should have, but he just didn't have the energy to do it. Ginny was gone.
Over the ensuing weeks they tried to get him to reignite their friendship. Harry stayed quiet. Harry was treated as the one who should voice his opinion, comment on the fact that those two were dating again. Again, he stayed quiet. They constantly asked him to decide who was right in the relationship when arguments erupted but Harry just ignored them and talked only when it was necessary. He had important matters to think about, not useless and pointless trivial concerns. Their love life, or lack thereof (by Hermione's standards since they weren't married and she wasn't giving it up, no siree Bob), was not something he cared to think about.
During his rounds as Head Boy, he usually caught several people kissing in secluded corners or some people almost half dressed in broom closets around the castle. Unlike most prefects and Head Boys, Harry didn't give detention unless they didn't listen to the warning he first gave them; he just told them go back to their dorm or Filch would find them. When they did ignore him and resume their make out session, he would then get serious and give them a week's detentions without a care.
It was easy to locate the couples thanks to the Marauders map. He hadn't used the map for this purpose before Ginny had died, but now he needed a distraction to keep his head from exploding in grief. He also didn't care if they did their kissing, snogging, and what have you before curfew. But once the 10pm chime sounded, he didn't want to find anyone as he walked the dark corridors of the castle. He didn't really care that some of the students were calling him "Mr. Anti-Snog." He just didn't want anything to happen to the students on his watch.
Not again.
Harry took his Head-boy duties seriously much to the teachers' delight. Some students thought he was a bit harsh when handing out punishments but several teachers disabused that notion when they talked about previous Head-boys such and the corruption of power they wielded.
Ron, of course, was jealous that Harry was Head-boy when he'd never been a prefect like him, but he quickly learned to curb his tongue after the third time in as many weeks he found himself in the Forbidden Forest with Filch for detention. As for late night rendezvous locations, Harry made sure nobody could use the Room of Requirement. That door was now sealed where only Dumbledore, the Flamels, or the professors could unlock it.
After his rounds were done and the last of the amorous students had been rousted out of their hiding holes before they could bless the world nine months later with the results of their coupling, Harry sat on a hill outside Hogwarts. He was allowed to leave the castle whenever he wanted to. Not like any one could stop him, especially at night. One of the advantages of being a Shadow Mage is that he could travel through shadows. All it took was the will to move and the imagination to conceptualize where he needed to go and the shadows would absorb him, only to place him where he wanted to go in the blink of an eye.
While sitting under the stars, Harry pondered and organized his thoughts. After the final battle had ended, at least half the students in Slytherin were gone. When Harry killed Voldemort with a soul destroying curse, he and everyone linked to him with the Dark Mark died. That included many students, and not all from Slytherin. Snape had been killed at the end of Harry's 6th year after showing his true colors. Those Slytherin students not killed outright had been suspected sympathizers and public outcry against their return was too much for Dumbledore to ignore. Most of those students had transferred to Beauxbatons Academy while a few had gone to private tutors.
Draco Malfoy, for all his money, prestige and pure-blooded bigotry, had decided to try and attack Harry through his friends long before that battle and on October 15th had lured Hermione to a secluded classroom with the full intention of raping her. He had been polyjuiced to look like Ron and Hermione thought she was simply going to get in some kissing between classes. Harry had followed her when he caught a sense of something being off from his friend. Later, he found that the perfume that she had gotten as a birthday present had reacted to a spell Malfoy had shot at her, leaching common sense out of the intended victim. It wasn't a dark potion but only semantics kept it from being labeled as such.
Harry slipped into blackness and attached himself to her shadow, walking down the same corridors she went through. When she met Malfoy, he calmly explained what he was going to do and how she wasn't going to remember anything other than Ron having taken her at Harry's insistence. Hermione's eyes were still glazed over from the effects of the spell while she started to disrobe, Malfoy laughing at the irony of it. Harry had heard enough and stunned his friend. He then disarmed Malfoy and ripped into his mind to find anything of potential value. Blood freely running out of his nose from the intrusion, Malfoy started to talk some smack at his arch nemesis, not really understanding how outclassed he really was.
Harry summoned the tainted perfume and poured it down Malfoy's mouth. A few minutes later as the potion took effect, Harry asked Malfoy to go take a swim in the lower part of the lake. Without the benefit of a bubble head charm or any other air. Malfoy agreed that that sounded like a grand idea and out he went. Harry, feeling guilty at the impending demise, then summoned some raw meat to stuff into Malfoy's pockets to get the merpeople good and riled up to rip him apart. Which they did and no one was any more aware of it than he was. Certainly not Hermione who didn't remember anything from that afternoon once she woke up back in her bed just prior to dinner.
He thought about that day every now and then. He wasn't really sorry about what he had done. He had removed a potential adversary. He was an annoyance when it was just Malfoy vs. Potter. But when he decided to take his sick fantasies out on his friends, he was a liability that needed removing. He regretted that Malfoy had gone down the path he did, but it was his choice.
After gathering his thoughts he decided to go visit Ginny's grave. He went there at least once every week. Sometimes more, never less. He was going to marry her; they were going to have a fine house. Even get a dog before they had children. She was going to show him the wonders of the world. Take him to see an ocean, or a desert in Egypt. They'd had plans.
Then all that crap happened. Voldemort. That big s-o-b. And now he wouldn't live a happy ending. He was alone again.
Ginny was buried at Godric's Hollow near his parents. Harry had requested it since she was his intended. The Weasleys made no objection; they were happy that Harry had loved Ginny so much that he wanted her buried in the Potter cemetery.
Now standing in front of her grave, Harry conjured hundreds of red roses to place around her tombstone.
"Hi, Ginny. It's me again," Harry started, sitting down on the cool grass.
After an hour of talking about what was happening at school, Harry sat there and stared at her grave. He sighed to himself. He didn't cry – the tears were no longer coming like they used to. He guessed he must be healing somewhat. He knew from Dumbledore that death wasn't just an end but the start of another adventure.
An adventure he wanted to accompany his dead girlfriend with, not alone. After a half hour of silence he laid his head on her grave and looked up to the stars. The quiet sounds of nature could be heard in the distance. Crickets, frogs, other creatures making noise. No humans.
Harry noticed a shooting star burning in the sky. Deciding to try his luck, he made a wish. "I wish I wasn't alone anymore. I wish I had a new life," he said as his eyes closed following the end of another long day.
After a few minutes, he slowly fell asleep. He could hear the crickets chirping and wondered what they were saying. He wondered if they thought he was crazy for spending as much time as he did at the gravesite. If he had looked at the sky again, he would have seen the shooting star explode into bright red-blue stars similar to when his broken time turner from the battle started to glow and spun backward and then vanished.