Chapter Text
Light drifts up past where his head rests, like smoke without wind. The light looks old, similar to how it filtered through the windows at Grimmauld, illuminating a place long lost to time. Like how the sun looked in a memory. A lazy smile grows across his lips, his eyes drifting shut as he goes back to sleep.
The next time he wakes up it is to a foreign comfort and cold light slanting across his eyes. Someone is combing their fingers through his tangled hair, so gently he almost doesn’t register it.
"You are safe," said in Harry’s voice, with Harry’s mouth. Without his will. Coming as natural as anything except for the fact that he had no control nor desire to speak them. “You are protected.”
His gaze sharpens, along with his mind, noticing for the first time the room he is in. The shadows fail to collect in the many shifting corners that expand around him. Slender fingers fall from his hair as he sits up, the soft pads of them trailing down from his hairline, following the contours of his jaw and ending gently upon his collar, before fading.
"You are not trapped." No, Harry thought. He’s not in a room, but a station. Not a station but a place to wait.
"You do not need to run." Harry says, and this makes him scramble to his feet with an unsteady motion. "That's a lie." he continues to.. himself? The first words he utters of his own volition. He’s always had to run, either from or to, but always away from here, wherever here was at that moment. At this moment, here was confusing, that's for sure, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have an exit.
The light has no beginning or end but Harry knows that he has a start. He knows that he has an end too, which means he has to think fast. Harry remembers what came with the light—or maybe before the light. The figure that had cradled his head in its lap. The being who touched Harry with a care he had never been granted before, the shadow that now congregates before him.
"What the fuck is going on?" Harry’s words are harsh but his tone is lacking. He knows he should be afraid but it's hard to summon up the adrenaline that has saved him so many times in the past.
The figure moves in response, but in which direction Harry can’t tell, as more words begin to spill from Harry’s mouth.
"You are Dead. You are loved. You are missed. You are mourned. You- Use your own voice damnit!" Harry cut himself off with a shout. "I am not your bloody puppet!"
The righteous fear was drifting away even now. It seems so hard to carry anything here for very long until the burden outweighed the spark.
Slowly, Death begins to rise from the ground. It wasn’t sitting before, and it isn’t standing after. At its height, it can look down on Harry as much as something without a face can look down on anything.
The fingers Harry had felt on his face were now gone, along with any hand that might have ever been there. It is a being of shifting purpose, existing only because it needed to for Harry to understand it. What does a God require of a body? To speak to another body.
Harry stands with feet shoulder-width apart, an empty palm curled uselessly at his side. His shoulders are relaxed but only because tension would slow him down. He faces Death with a warrior's stance. Death faces him with twinkling eyes peering down.
" Harry, I owe you an explanation, An explanation of an old man's mistakes ,” utters the beast of a god, with tongues shifting as often on its face. Blue eyes stared out from a form that was nothing more than a way to look.
Quickly then, the gaze melts into a familiar burning emerald. Echoing through the landscape, comes the screams of a woman, his mother: "Not Harry! Please… Have mercy… have mercy…" her sobs shaking the light beneath his feet. Harry’s legs feel weak as he falls, shadows pooling where his knees hit the ground.
Death’s form spasms as more eyes begin to open. Muddy brown and a golden hue dotting his left side, an eye so dark it is almost unseen appearing along where its jaw should be, tens more blinking and focusing as voices overlap over his mothers.
"The Boy Who Lived!" "Harry Potter?" "The Chosen One!" "Savior Potter. " His name spat and cursed and savored, over and over and over again. All the things he had always been, never knowing a time when he wasn’t, "Freak." "Good for nothing." "Liar" "Foolish boy. "
The landscape grows both blinding and muted along the edges of his sight, graying the border between land and light before the eyes upon Death stopped their hungry gaze all at once, snapping shut until only two hazel eyes remain. The chatter and growing fervor was immediately cut apart by the voice of McGonagall rising above the rest, "...a boy, not a piece of meat!"
The pupils quickly expanded to swallow the iris as those black pools led to the words that Harry had heard so recently.
" You have been raising him like a pig for slaughter."
Snape’s words follow him as he stands shakily back on his feet. Harry feels his chest heaving as he searches desperately for the words that Death seemed to find so easily. "What do you want?" He demanded, "Is this hell or something?”
Black blooms to emerald, " You've been so brave. " crooning from Death’s still form with his mother's voice. And doesn’t that just break Harry’s heart more than anything else? More than his own end. So when Death reaches for him, with a hand newly made, Harry only flinches for a moment before leaning into the palm that seems so desperate to cradle his jaw once more.
" Things have changed. I can touch you now ." hisses quietly along the floor as the eyes bleed into rust. Harry clutches at the arm between them, fingers gripping cloth and flesh and bone that was not there a second ago. With the stolen words comes a realization.
There was something else here.
In the light, which has always been there, and behind Death, which has been there for even longer if that is possible, lies something. Someone? Him . The part of him older than Harry but also just as young. Far younger than the light and Death.
Blue eyes look down at him, shining with excitement. " He transferred some of his own powers to you ," says Death, stealing Dumbledore's voice again.
Harry untangles from the space around and next to and in Death as he stumbles to Him , Death trailing behind, content to let Harry’s attention wander.
It is pretty gross, looking half-rotten and jagged in its reality.
"He," Harry mutters to himself aloud. He is pretty gross. He is still human, even if it's just a fraction of it. Voldemort’s monstrous life was the result of losing himself, not of something else moving in.
Nothing came to fill in the empty spaces that Riddle chipped away at. Just a gaping space between himself and the rest of eternity that he spent his life desperately trying to rise above.
He sits down next to the pantomime of a child, crossing his legs just inches from the form. Harry feels Death appear behind him, whispers of it brushing against the top of his spine.
Riddle lays so still, that for a moment Harry worries he has died. But no, he sees that little festering chest rising and falling in all its stuttering, wounded, raw glory. Harry’s palm hovers above the Horcrux’s ribs, hesitating just a few breaths out of reach before lowering it gently, barely touching the flesh of this torn soul. Riddle's brow furrows in a fussy expression, but his eyes do not open.
Maybe he shouldn't be calling this thing "Riddle." It is a shadow of a shadow of the man. Harry honestly didn't know how this devouring light hadn't already swallowed the baby whole. But then again, he reminds himself, a whisper of a human is still nothing but a human.
With closed eyes, the child, Riddle, wraps their little hands around Harry's thumb and ring finger. And there Harry’s heart went, breaking all over again.
"Fucking of course," he mumbles as he places his palm beneath Riddle’s head and the other at his back, lifting him to his chest and cradling him awkwardly. Of course he has to sympathize with his prophesied enemy. As if he hadn't already done that enough when Dumbledore showed him all those memories.
He tries to be gentle, but it looks like Riddle was born bruised, and he fears he is hurting the broken soul more than comforting him.
What felt like a firm and warm hand falls on his shoulder as Death’s rattle fills the room once more, Voldemort's voice seeming to speak over itself echoing back and forth as if talking for both Death and this broken body Harry is holding, and Harry as well.
" I can touch you now ."
Harry shrugs off the hand that was never there before standing and turning to face the rusted gaze of Death.
"Right, what's all this then?" Harry questioned flatly. He didn’t feel much urgency in his voice, but if he had to keep dealing with shit, then he felt he more than deserved some fucking answers. "I get it; I died, he died, and you're Death. But why am I not dead? And why is he still my problem?" he asks, clutching said problem a little closer when Death's eyes close.
After a few eternities pass, Harry waiting with a patience he hadn't known since he escaped the cupboard, Death opens his eyes. Harry pales as that gaze shifts between that warm honey brown and the manic gray that so often used to clash.
"He's not your son." "He’s as good as. "
"And then he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life," silver eyes dance as Xenophilius’ voice recites the story, Dumbledores piercing blue rushing into the iris’ before the sentence is even finished, " You know how and why she died. Make sure it was not in vain."
"It really is like going to bed after a very, very long day."
Each shadowed line seems to scoop more and more out of Harry until he is left standing empty. "Wait… please wait," he mutters, his head spinning as he feels Riddle begin to squirm. He startles and loosens his grip, hushing and murmuring nonsense under his breath, distracting himself by turning his focus to the weight in his arms.
"Son, why son? Is this… because of the Hallows? Or the Horcrux? Or both?"
The eyes turn beady : "Killing rips the soul apart." turn muddy, "I am sure you are fond of each other very deep down." turn warm , "whatever you say, blood’s important."
"You're in trouble if you get too fond of or dependent on the Horcrux."
Harry’s breathing stutters again, "Hermione," he whispers, suddenly desperate to have his best-friend by his side. She would know what to say, what to do. They’ve been a team for a year now, the Horcrux hunt changing the dynamic from a triad to partners. She was the only one who had his back for so long now. The only one he could trust completely and suddenly she's gone and he has to figure out all of this…by himself?
He barks out a brittle and thin laugh, edging on manic in his disbelief. "Fond?" Harry questions rudely. "You want me to love him, is that it?"
Suddenly the air is split with the deranged laughter of Bellatrix, seeming to crawl out of the edges of light and hound him. For the first time since waking up beside Death, Harry feels truly afraid.
" It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love. " Slughorn's voice pools into the world, but his words feel heavy, like they can't hold their own weight.
Harry feels dread begin to pool in his stomach. "That's potions, though. That doesn’t apply to me carrying around some insane man's soul for my whole life!"
Harry wishes that he wasn't so aware of the weight in his arms, so attentive to how he shifted the small body closer to his own in an attempt to settle the Horcrux. He wants to scream so badly that it feels like something is crawling up his limbs and twisting around his collar bone. He feels like he's going to be ripped apart by this betrayal. How could he do this to himself?
"I can't care for him. I hate him. I hate him," he croaks out, half the words breaking in his throat, making him choke.
Eyes that he had never seen outside the film of overly prescribed glass peered down at him before rolling back so only the white remains, " THE DARK LORD LIES ALONE AND FRIENDLESS…"
At this, the Horcrux opens his eyes to watch Harry in silence. Riddle’s gaze is mildly curious and implicitly trusting, which honestly strikes Harry quite harshly.
"He saw himself in you before he had ever seen you.”
Harry never shied from it. Not truly, at least. He followed Voldemort’s trail like a clumsy shadow, never being able to stay away. Harry remembers how his hands used to hold the diary, the locket, the same way he was holding him now. With great care and reverence, pitifully disguised as obligation.
"The curse that failed to kill you seems to have forged some kind of connection between you and the Dark Lord." Snape's voice repeated, "when your mind is most relaxed and vulnerable — when you are asleep, for instance — you are sharing the Dark Lord’s thoughts and emotions."
Since he was a child, he was sleeping with his soul curled around another's. That had to do something to a person, right? How can anyone get out of that unscathed?
When his eyes lock with the icy blue, the air stills, pulling with tension like a weight bearing down on the space between him and Death.
" It was your heart that saved you," It’s Dumbledore's voice, in his words, but the tone isn't right. It wasn't from his memory of that evening. It sounds mournful now, as if filled with a great regretful empathy that can only come from knowing how this was tearing Harry apart, down to the magic boiling in his bloodstream.
He wants to wail. He wants the whole world to grab him by the shoulders and weep for him as he has died for it, over, and over, and over again. But it was just him, Death and Tom. So he cries for himself. He cries silently, his breath only hiccupping every once in a while. He wouldn't have cleaned his face even if he could, letting his eyes redden and his lips stretch and purse as he quietly gasps.
Death doesn't have any eyes to watch with, but the Horcrux more than makes up for it. Riddle stares up at Harry with wide eyes, but whatever expression he may have had was impossible to make out past the damage of being a soul torn apart. As Harry carries on weeping for a few more centuries, the horcrux’s grip tightens ever so slowly, still weaker than a promise but undoubtedly there in a way that Death and the light couldn’t be.
After millennia like that, years of grief that he finally purged, Harry straightens his spine. What a gift it was, time to feel sorrow. It was a luxury he never had before now. Time here did not flow as much as it staggered and danced but patience is something he is learning to build no matter how much it goes against his habits. Care is also something he is learning, from a new perspective.
He carries his mortal enemy in his arms with a gentleness Harry has always struggled to express.
He might be fond of him. He definitely hates him. Unfortunately, it looks like he can't live without him. Also, unfortunately, he is too dead to do anything about it now. Harry finally turns his gaze to Death, signaling the end of his mourning period.
At this, Death sharpens into material existence, having faded after the first 20 years of weeping and growing steadily fainter since. Now though, its indistinct form carries the weight of gravedirt on lungs once again and Dumbledore's blue eyes precede the words that come next.
"He did not kill you, as he intended, but gave you powers, and a future..."
"A future?" Harry mumbled faintly, his fear being echoed by the Horcrux’s growing wimpers: "I am a dead man killed by Riddle in cold blood." He wants to sound angry but he just feels weary.
Death waits patiently as Harry begins to sooth the Horcrux, its initial sniffling and tears tapering off quickly into shallow gasps, its little grip flexing in time.
"What future is there with a man torn apart?"
With this question, Death seems to seep out of its control, like it can barely manifest in its eagerness to finally get to the point of it all.
"Anything's possible if you've got enough nerve," Ginny's sight and voice is quickly followed by Hermione's "but it would be excruciatingly painful." The light shifts around them .
"Remorse, you've got to really feel what you've done."
The landscape is dimming, and the ground beneath Harry feels like it is both lighter and heavier, like it wants to entomb him before spitting him back out.
"Apparently the pain of it can destroy you."
Death is growing, its concept infecting what was previously a pretty clear distinction between it and the light.
Unfamiliar eyes appear over Hermione’s, and the voice that comes next would be hard to identify if it weren’t for being one of the last ones Harry heard before his death. The steady, urgent tone of his father soothes and strengthens him all at once. "Do you understand, Harry?"
Harry honestly felt like none of his questions had been answered and he wasn't sure what was happening, but he felt sure of himself in the way he only did when he had no choice but to act.
How many more recycled lines would this Dead God have to patch together before Harry accepted that he was going to have to do something, and like all of his most important life decisions he wouldn't have any help with it nor time to think it over.
Following such ideas, Death gave him less than a second to contemplate this, and Harry’s self and everything outside of himself began to static in its harshness.
"Do it now…" raised up thousands of times over, in his dead father’s voice, overlapping like a general's war orders and a mass reciting prayer.
"Be ready to run…" The light shaking in the violent way mothers reassure themselves.
Harry is on his knees, ``Do it now!" and his second father, Sirius Black’s eyes open above James’, as his bellow splits the light into ragged splinters.
"Run."
Something whole tearing into an impossible half as Harry falls, only to be again, on the forest floor filled with rot and death and him.