Finishing his food and drinking the apple delight, he piled the trash into his former treasure hole under the floor board on top of his new wallet, and made himself more comfortable. He felt much more prepared to address the damage that baby daemon had caused, and he was not going to let some jerk mess up his wonderful grassland. Pulling the warm light green threads into his neck again, he felt them wrap around his brain again as he slid back into whiteness.
The world was green again. He fell forward and felt his toes digging slightly into grass and dirt, his hands reaching and holding him up. He had expected returning here to be harder, to require more effort than this. He stood and began to take stock of the damage.
The sky was still torn from the blackness, with thin dark cracks like unmoving lightning crossing the heavens. The corpse explosion had roughly dug into the sod, leaving a jagged crater. Even without the evil sludge, the crater felt rough and torn. Smaller piles of grass and earth had been tossed by the explosion, coating the ground and a few pieces had even dropped into his wood basement hall. But the worse part was the sky.
He frowned as he looked around. Before there had been a single pulsing dark cloud, but now there seemed to be many lighter clouds, creating a sort of storm. The existing white and fluffy memories were holding them together, apart from each other, but it didn't feel right.
Almost absently he stretched his right hand, and a light gray cloud etched in dark black was yanked from the heavens. It seemed to be a memory, but it felt tainted, twisted. Just trying to view it caused him to feel dirty. But he couldn't leave this here, especially if it felt so wrong. He formed a new glass bottle from his green threads and took a firm hold on the dark recollection. Twisting it like a towel, he squeezed the cloud. Black anger, rage, even cries of victory and defiance oozed into the bottle. As he finished, he used new cords of green light to cleanse his own threads of the goo, shoving it all into the bottle that was now labeled with the contained emotions, a date, a time, and a place. He sealed the bottle and set it aside, and examined the left over pieces of memory.
Before the thought had dripped with anger, as the dark man was punishing someone for some perceived slight. Now the cloud seemed dull and gray, like an old black and white silent film. The voices and actions were still recognizable, but the feelings and fear and terror had been separated and stored. That daemon baby must have released this cloud here on its death, or the original memory must have collapsed into smaller fragments now that the intelligence restraining it had died.
The memory had no real use for the green eyed child, so he compressed it into a gray sphere. Wrapping both sphere and glass bottle with his green threads, he climbed downstairs into the wood hall and passed through the metal door into the evil duck room. Waiving a hand of threads at one of the walls, he created a row of shelving marking time, place, and emotion and a small plaque labeled "Evil and Not Useful". Torture had no appeal to him, he did not really even want to hurt the horrible people who he suffered under. Just live and let live. Still, he found the place where this bottle of evil would rest and placed it on a stand. Glancing back at the stand with the duck, the boy gave another grin. He had a pattern going, right? As he left the room, the bottle now had the gray memory (Now duck shaped) floating on the hatred that used to saturate it. He sighed as he exited upstairs, watching the sky that seemed filled with clouds again, many with black edges. Seeing no point in delaying, he grabbed a new memory and began creating more glass bottles. He had a sinking suspicion that he was going to have a LOT of new duck friends in the metal room.
It was seconds or years later. Time did not seem to move as expected in his mind. He tried to deal with all the dripping clouds first. After finding more than a small amount of torture, he quickly learned not to review them. Each got squeezed, ducked, an stored. After hearing a woman crying, he had looked more closely into another cloud.
He had vomited twice. Creating that bottle taught him to just store them and move on. Any that had a similar color he also shoved into a locked cabinet in the metal duck room, sealed and bound using his own memory cloud of WATCHING that memory, turned into a knot. He could not help her, no one could now, so he used the memory of him being horrified, disgusted, and angry as a warning to himself to not look within. He still could guess how many other women, or even children, had suffered under that monster. That cabinet was filling quickly, and that fact alone was scary to him.
In a way the torture was easier to watch. He had experience with pain, with degradation. He had come to terms with it in his own life already. But watching others forced to hurt loved ones, watching offenses to innocents, it was too much. He stored them away, categorized and locked with his own warning keeping him from growing curious about what was in the dark cabinet.
Eventually he ran out of those colored clouds, and his relief was almost spiritual. He was glad he had only let those things loose for a short time, it could have twisted his world and stained it with horrible sludge.
He did have some unpleasantness to handle though. He had found the companion memory of the Red Woman, from the killers point of view. He had been avoiding it, but the lightning told him clearly which one it was.
With only a slight hesitance and a shaky hand, he sent cables of green light around the cloud and began to drain it.
He had been sitting in the red room for a while now. He should probably do something. He would probably think about it later. The memory had been large, much larger than the shred he had. It had apparently been the last memory of a man who was called Voldemort.
It was also the last memory of James Potter and Lilly Potter. And apparently, one of the first memories of him, Harry Potter. He stood staring at the new podium in the red room. He had managed to create two images from the memory, and painted them in color on the wall. A man with wild black hair, deep hazel eyes, and a thin body was standing with anger and defiance. He was a pillar of strength in a room filled with damage and the remains of a home. Hand outstretched, a wood stick flaring with light, and his shoulders held firm. It was just before he had been struck by the green light.
To his right was the Red Woman. Her hair was dark red and flaring, and almost blended into the painted walls of the room. Her body was wrapped around him, the "freak" Harry, the little babe who seemed so confused. Her crystal green eyes had defiance in them, and they glowed like his threads.
He had stared for a long time. Several dreams were now impossible. No, his parents did not die in a car crash. But they would also not be coming to take him home. They would not be able to save him.
After some time, he raised his shoulders. He had been alone till now, nothing had changed. No, that was not right. HE had changed. He had unknowingly hurt part of the creature that had assaulted his... his Dad. His Mom. His family. And they had not fallen apart, they did not give up just because there was no options. He was Harry Potter, son of James Potter and son of Lily Potter, and by God he was going to become someone they could be proud of.
He waved his hand, filling the room with lily flowers. He changed the gray memory of their final hours into a tomb stone, with their names under each image on the wall. Harry would do them proud, and the first step was to become whole and healed.
Striding up the red carpeted stairs, he sealed the room. After he cleaned his world, he would search the oldest clouds. Maybe more memories existed. But for now, he had work to do.