The Consequences of Crashing Death's Wedding

by shefrommo

Or: The True Story of How the Hallows Came To Be and Other Things History Got Wrong. Note: The author's note at the bottom has deleted scenes and character notes for anyone who is interested. Warning: spotty updates and liberal use of headcanons.

Summary: Or: The True Story of How the Hallows Came To Be and Other Things History Got Wrong. Warning: spotty updates and liberal use of headcanons.

Author's Note: Each chapter consists of several micro-chapters, or drabbles. Whichever word you prefer is fine, it doesn't really matter. I personally prefer micro-chapters. There may be crossovers in a micro-chapter, which will be clearly labelled, that are not present in other micro-chapters. The micro-chapters may or may not be continued, and if you want to use the idea listed in one of the micro-chapters, please leave a review asking first.

In the first chapter, unless I specify otherwise, you can assume that there is a soulmate AU of some sort present and/or in the background. If it's relevant, it will be explained in the micro-chapter. If it's not and the micro-chapter summary does not mention that there is no soulmate AU, then you can imagine whatever soulmate AU you prefer to be present. You should also be warned that there is some gender-bending for comedic reasons.

Micro-Chapter 1: Why Gryffindor has no Heir. (First Words AU, minor crossover with Merlin)

"Salazar Slytherin was a lucky man. His family owned the land close to the Court of the King Ravenclaw, and as their Heir and brightest member, he was allowed to attend Court Meetings. More importantly, he was allowed near their Crown Princess, Rowena Ravenclaw.

Rowena Ravenclaw was undoubtedly the brightest witch to have ever graced the Magical Kingdom of Scotia. Salazar had known her for many years, having been originally picked as one of her childhood playmates, and then as an intellectual rival as they aged. Many of the old men that made up the Court of Ravenclaw said that she was impetuous and an upstart and frequently beseeched King Ravenclaw to have his daughter behave in a more womanly manner.

Salazar would scoff at them. After all, what else could Rowena be but willfully brilliant and brilliantly willful? Gaius II, Rowena's soulmate and the son of the Great Sorcerer Merlin, liked her just as she was and as neither he nor King Ravenclaw had chided her for her behavior, Rowena would never change.

Not that she would even if they said anything to her. Rowena was frustratingly stubborn that way.

Of course there were plenty of people who thought little of Gaius II's opinion and even less of his ability to serve as the next King Ravenclaw. The fools were of the opinion that by naming him after Merlin's little-known uncle, the Great Sorcerer had doomed his son to a life of mediocrity. That Gaius II consistently failed to rein his tempestuous wife was regarded as another black mark against him by the sexist old fools.

Salazar and Gaius II often laughed over this. Gaius II's refusal to rein in his wife was due less to an inability to stand up to her, and more to his perpetual amusement with the fact that Rowena, at five foot zero, could outsmart men who were a head taller than her and both twice her weight and her age. As for those fools who said that Gaius II was a magicless squib? Well, as Gaius II often said, "Tis better to be underestimated and have a force of weaklings come for my head than to be overestimated and have the best fighters swing both their axes and their wands at my neck."

This would, of course, prompt Theodosius to respond that at least the opposition would aim at Gaius II's head. When they came for Thoedosius', he had to contend with them aiming at his knees.

Theodosius was the soulmate and husband of Crown Princess Helga Hufflepuff of Magical Normandy. The giant of a man stood nearly two heads taller than anyone in any given room, and positively dwarfed his petite wife.

They were, as Gaius II and Rowena were, quite a well-matched pair. Helga and Theodosius were very kindhearted people – exhibit A being their First Words to each other, wherein they apologized profusely for an occurrence which was neither party's fault. Of course, it took them a moment to realize what the other had said – there always was a delay in between when a pair of soulmates would say their First Words and when their Words would heat up on their skin to alert them that they had just met their soulmate.

Gaius II and Rowena, on the other hand, were a match made in heaven…if one considered verbal war and intellectual debates to be heaven. Salazar was privy to their First Words to each other – which were exceedingly private and not to be discussed with anyone who was not their soulmate – only because he had been present during their meeting.

Rowena had rather rudely demanded that Gaius II move out of her way immediately and the man, who had then been dressed as a servant boy in order to blend in with the kitchen staff, had merely tilted his head up, stopped peeling his potato, and said "I don't hear a 'please' there, Princess." Rowena had been speechless with shock, and had then moved straight into fury.

She had been very aware of the fact that her soulmate and/or husband would have to be the next King Ravenclaw and she resented what she saw as a poor plebian becoming her master in all things. Salazar's closest friend had never taken to being controlled very well nor had she enjoyed the idea that she would have to submit to her soulmate/husband's whims once she met them. That her soulmate was a likely illiterate boy had thrown salt on the metaphorical injuries. It had taken Gaius II protesting that he was merely dressing up – or rather, dressing down – to avoid his father's boring meetings to get her to stop snarling at him.

When he was younger, Salazar would always say that Rowena was the most willful, scandalous woman he would ever meet. Then he turned twenty, and while escorting Rowena, Gaius II, and the newly arrived and introduced Helga and Theodosius around his family fiefdom, he ran into his soulmate. It was then that he discovered the reason why his Words – scrawled across his left bicep in an offensively bright shade of gold – read "Of course I'm wearing britches! What else would I wear?"

The reason was that, in one of the numerous farming villages on his family's property, there was the most ridiculous, atypical, scandalous woman in existence. She was his soulmate and her name was Gwendolyn Gryffindor. And yes, she wore men's britches instead of a lady's skirt.

Gwendolyn was one of the most talented witches Salazar would ever meet, easily on par with the well-taught Rowena and Helga despite having neither been taught magic nor owning a wand. She did own a stolen pitchfork with which she beat off village boys wishing to tell her to put on proper women's clothing. It was a pitchfork she wielded with great effect on Salazar himself when he protested her clothing choices during their first meeting.

To Salazar's great misfortune, even when they married, Gwendolyn refused to give up her pitchfork and wear skirts. Salazar was forced to propose to her not with a ring and sweet words, but with a bejeweled sword and promises of sword fighting lessons, and Gwendolyn attended their wedding dressed in a pair of his riding breeches that she had stolen out of his wardrobe. She then proceeded to hang the pitchfork on their bedroom wall and charmed it to stay there regardless of what Salazar did to remove it.

Salazar was a very lucky man in his life. It was, contrary to all of his complaints otherwise, only after the death of all of the contributors to the Binational Magic Academy on Hill's Waters that he became unlucky. After Salazar, Gwendolyn, Rowena, Gaius II, Theodosius and Helga passed away, the overlooked sexist Court members finally had their revenge against the brilliant wizards and witches.

Gaius II and Theodosius, having had little to do with the founding of the Binational Magic Academy due to other duties, were written out the Academy's history. They had become the Kings of Magical Scotia and Normandy respectively and were so busy with their kingly duties that their contribution consisted mostly of a medieval blank check to their wives, and in Gaius II's case, the old, abandoned castle of Camelot. Without its king there, Camelot had fallen to ruin and its people had scattered, though they still believed that Merlin would resurrect Arthur and lead them all to Albion.

Rowena had taken one look at it and declared it the perfect place to build a school. It even, she had exclaimed, had convenient defenses perfect for warding off non-magical invaders.

The old farts renamed that castle when the Founders Six passed away. No longer was it known as the Binational Magic Academy on Hill's Waters, but by the deliberately inelegant name of Hogwarts.

The sexist old coots wanted to destroy all evidence of the witches' contributions to the castle. Unfortunately, they couldn't destroy the houses that they had built. Instead they sought to reduce their legacy to nothing. While Helga and Rowena, being Crown Princesses and later Queens of two very powerful magical kingdoms, could not be erased from history, Gwendolyn Slytherin nee Gryffindor was a mere plebian and could be.

In short, they turned the redheaded Founder into a man. They renamed her Godric Gryffindor and spread the word far and wide that two men and two women had built a revolutionary magic school. They took her sword and had 'Godric Gryffindor' inscribed on it. They destroyed the Slytherin manor, in particular Gwendolyn's pitchfork. They took an unhealthy amount of pleasure in burning her breeches.

Then they delivered their coup de grâce. They said that Salazar and his wife, now considered a man, were bitter enemies and that Salazar had left, swearing to never return.

Theodosius and Helga's children lived in Normandy and heard of all this far too late to stop any of it. Gaius II and Rowena had one daughter, Helena, who died during their lifetimes. She could do nothing to stop the besmirching of her family's names. Salazar and Gwendolyn's daughter was hunted down for protesting this warping of her parent's legacy, and only escaped by marrying a magically weak man named Horrendous Lee Gaunt. She never spoke of her birth family until she lay on her deathbed and only then to her granddaughter.

Over time, the world forgot the true story of the Founders Six, and now I alone remember it. And so ends my tale of my creators." – The Sorting Hat, the last of Gwendolyn's attempts at sewing shirt sleeves to the shirt. (And, indeed, at any kind of womanly art. Salazar despaired of the 'shirt,' which had its cuff sewn shut into a point, which prompted Gwendolyn to wear it as a hat.)

M-C 2: Why Only the Youngest Peverell Sibling Had Children. (Crossover with very sketchy Mythology)

Since the early days of humanity, there have been gods. They are born, not from a womb, but from humanity's belief in their existence.

Humans have soulmates. These are the people that they will meet and love in some form in every life. As humans have soulmates, so too do the creatures spawned from their belief.

Of course, a soulmate is someone who will, at the risk of sounding cliché, complement their other half in the most perfect way.

What better way to prevent immortal, all-powerful beings from getting bored and destroying the world than to give them soulmates who are mortal and will never attain immortality, forever serving as a reminder to their everlasting soulmates that there is, in fact, a reason not to destroy the world out of boredom? (Or so goes the logic of the Mysterious One True God Who May or May Not Exist.)

So these immortal beings live in the knowledge that their mortal counterparts are out there and while they may watch them die, they will always be able to see them immediately afterwards. Unlike mortals, these gods and goddesses are capable of finding their soulmate anywhere and frequently stalk them while under a self-contained ward that prevents mortals from noticing them. They stalk their soulmates throughout their early lives, fretting over their health unseen and unheard, until the day that they may finally interact with their unfortunate soulmates without seeming like the creepy stalkers they truly are.

As an interesting side effect, they are normally so busy watching their beloved die that they miss their soulmates birth. It's only in outlier cases, such as when their soulmate is reborn as the mismatched couple's child while the mortal half of the couple dies in childbirth, that they see their soulmate during or immediately after birth.

There is one exception to the rule. All gods and goddesses save one are soulmates to a mortal. This one exception is the singular god of death. His soulmate is the singular goddess of life. As there are, have been, and will be many religions, there are a great many of gods and goddesses who represent the same aspects. Death and Life are most peculiar in that they are the only immortals who represent that particular part of well…life.

They are referred to as Death and Life because there are a great many religions and personal names are needed to distinguish between deities representing the same thing. That Death and Life are only deities of those aspects is considered mostly irrelevant and the mostly is only tacked on because they have their choice of names to pick.

Now, politics know no boundaries and are present even in an isolated society of immortal, all-powerful beings. If anything, they are worse in the aforementioned society, because then all of them want to know just how much better they are than the rest of the immortals. More specifically, they want to know how much better they are than the others that represent the same things as they do. It may be accurate to say that egos know no boundaries, as well as politics.

And so begins the tale of the Deathly Hallows, as they are called in this modern day and age.

According to legend, there were three Peverell brothers, Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus. They came to a river and conjured a bridge. Death then appeared to them, angered by the lack of death. Eventually, after much testosterone-influenced conversation, Antioch came away with the Elder Wand and died because he bragged about it to the wrong person later that night. Cadmus died, presumably of starvation, after staring fixatedly at the image of his deceased fiancée conjured by the Resurrection Stone. Ignotus displayed the fact that he actually had a working brain, unlike his brothers, and got an Invisibility Cloak so that he could play Hide-n-Seek with Death to his heart's delight.

This is an excellent example of both wizarding sexism, and why idiots should not enter their stupidity into the gene pool.

There were indeed three Peverell siblings. Their names were Antioch, the oldest son, Cadmus, the middle child, and Ianthe, the only daughter.

Ianthe was the reincarnation of Life, for what defines Life better than endlessly repeating lives? Well, being reborn as a woman and creating and birthing life is a pretty good definition as well, which is why Life is always female. Always. Even when the incarnation of Life in some religions is male.

And so, Ianthe grew older and came to know Death, after he finally stopped stalking her and approached her. Notably, she did not know who he was at first and hexed him for creeping her out and only then did he explain who he was. The mortal-repelling ward does not work on fellow immortals, no matter if they think that they are mortal.

Finally, Ianthe and Thanatos, for he had decided to call himself that during that time, decided to wed each other. Ianthe, as was only proper of a witch at that time, informed her two older brothers of her impending wedding as she had no other living adult male relatives to inform.

Antioch and Cadmus, being jerks and the most unsupportive siblings in the history of siblings, decided to crash their sister's wedding in protest of her marrying someone they had not known existed until half an hour before the aforementioned wedding.

Ianthe came dressed in a resplendent, shimmering gown, complete with a glittering veil that doubled as a hood. She had a bouquet of elder flowers which matched the night sky fairly well.

The ceremony took place at night, at the nearby river. All of the attendees agreed that it was beautiful, and the moon and stars reflecting on the river's surface made for an especially picturesque background as Thanatos slid an expensive ring onto his bride's finger.

And then came the disaster.

Antioch and Cadmus had dealt with the initial shock of their sister's impending nuptials by drinking more alcohol than they should have. With this so-called 'liquid courage', the precursor to Firewhiskey, running through them, they decided to intrude and throw several cutting curses at the happy pair.

They were sober enough to not hit their sister with a strong one and aimed to startle the two apart before focusing their rage on their new brother-in-law. Unfortunately, they slightly misjudged the strength of their spells and very accidently sliced their sister's dress apart in the front.

Poor Ianthe shrieked in horror, and Thanatos came to his beloved's rescue. Of course, being infuriated with the scum that had just crashed their wedding, he was slightly less attentive than he should have been and turned her dress into a Tattered Invisibility Wedding Gown. In his defense, he did the first thing that he could think of, which was hide Ianthe from any perverted onlookers.

Then, not having a stick to hit his brothers-in-law with, he snatched Ianthe's Elder Flower Bouquet, killed all of the flowers so that all he had left was the petrified branch, and began to hit the inebriated men with it.

When everyone had calmed down a few minutes later, and one of the aging and very disapproving men attending had retrieved two Sobering Potions to force feed the Peverell brothers, Ianthe was understandably upset. She said that she wished that their very stern mother was there to punish Antioch and Cadmus for their exceedingly inappropriate behavior.

Thanatos, feeling very sorry for destroying Ianthe's bouquet and lacking the ability to revive it or conjure a living one due to his status as the god of death, took Ianthe's new ring and gave it a little magic. He then gave it back to her and told her to think of her mother while rubbing the black diamond on it. When Ianthe complied, the shade of her mother reappeared and, upon having the situation explained to her, promptly screamed herself hoarse at her two wayward sons.

Thanatos then proceeded to punish the two males by ensuring that neither of them would be able to sire children ever again. Unfortunately, Antioch was already the father of one Beedle Peverell. To completely humiliate them, Thanatos also ensured that anyone attempting to say Peverell would instead say Putter, Potter, Pen-eater, Piddle-Paddle, Pot-scrubber, Pop or any variation of a bizarre word beginning with a P. Anything but Peverell. The curse would wear out after two hundred years, but by that time, the two would be long dead.

Many years later, Ianthe's ruined wedding dress was turned into a very pretty cloak that her daughter Hyacinth wore to her wedding. Ianthe's nephew, Beedle, despised the laughingstock he and his father and uncle had become, and how his aunt and her line seemed completely at ease being called Pilfer or Pluck on the streets.

Beedle, it should be noted, was a very arrogant, self-absorbed man just like his father and uncle. Like them, he craved what Ianthe had been given by her errant husband. 'Thanatos', he felt, was nothing more than some magically powerful Muggleborn who had decided to leech off of the Peverell family's wealth and renown. He had, after all, failed to pass on a family name to his wife and daughter, and was frequently away for long periods of time and to Beedle this meant that the scum was probably off squandering the family fortune.

It should be noted that immortals don't have surnames and Thanatos did not pass one to his wife and child on simply because he did not have one. Also, as stated earlier, politics is universal and the poor god of death, as the sole representative of death, was required to hold his own against every other politically inclined faction. He also had much to do, regarding his duties as the singular god of death.

When Beedle saw his cousin, Hyacinth, die and her young daughter and son become orphans, he acted, redeeming his line in the eyes of their ancestors. (Or so he felt; it was to be noted that he was quite mad and one of his most memorable accomplishments was writing complete nonsense that, to this very day, only children read.)

He took Ianthe's Resurrection Wedding Ring and, failing to remove the diamond from the rest of the ring, proudly declared that his uncle had come into possession of a very incredible stone that resurrected people. He took Ianthe's Dead Elder Bouquet and, as the memento of that disastrous wedding still had traces of Thanatos's magic in it from the forced decay, declared it to be the invincible Elder Wand, which his father had died because of. He then stole Ianthe's Damaged Invisibility Gown, and renamed it the Invisibility Cloak.

Then, in an attempt to redeem that horrible wedding and insult his absentee uncle, he spun a wild tale about meeting Death at the riverside, and the deaths of two brave and honorable men at the hands of a repulsive character, complete with lies about a cowardly male who hid from Death and had a son – not even Ianthe's daughter was spared from her cousin's lunacy – and the illustrious title of 'Master of Death'.

Shortly after writing this ridiculous fabrication into his book of nonsense, he went on a walk and immediately proceeded to be pickpocketed by an urchin who took the Resurrection Wedding Ring to a pawnshop and sold it. A homely woman from the Gaunt family promptly saw the ring and bought it, knowing nothing about its origins.

Beedle soon went on a rampage in the middle of the budding Diagon Alley, demanding his ring back, and was brought down by several wizards and witches protecting their families. One of these wizards took the Dead Elder Bouquet in order to prevent him from casting magic.

Eventually, someone realized that 'that raving lunatic Beedle' was the guardian of two kids and Sam and Willow Peverell, by then most commonly pronounced Potter, were rescued.

Beedle would die a few months later, when Thanatos finally heard what happened and killed him, now that Life was not around to stop him from doing so. She had long since been reborn into a veela family, and Death had his hands full keeping all of the young men away from her.

Sam was sent to Hogwarts and eventually took on the title of Family Head after Beedle died. His line went on to name themselves the Potters and kept the name even after Thanatos' curse died out. The Potters' most closely guarded secret, however, was that they had kept Ianthe's Damaged Invisibility Gown, although it remained a closely guarded secret only because they did not realize that it was not a cloak but their ancestor's ruined wedding dress.

M-C 3: The Real Reason Why James and Lily Potter Didn't Hide in the Potter Main Estate (Continuation of previous micro-chapter)

The Potter Family's second most closely guarded secret was that none of them had ever inherited the Family Magic, as Sam Peverell – the younger child – was not actually the Heir of his Family.

Willow Peverell, it was discovered, was a squib, and the girl was sent to live with Muggles where she grew up, married, and had a daughter. Willow, being the Peverell Heiress despite her squib status, passed on the Family Magic to her daughter, who would go on to pass it down onto her line. Eventually, Willow's many greats-grandson Harry Evans would marry Anna Worringson, who was seven months pregnant with her ex-husband's daughter at the time of the Evans-Worringson wedding. In honor of Harry's family tradition, the couple named their firstborn Petunia. Harry's first biological daughter, Lily Evans, inherited the Peverell Family Magic and became the first one in her family since Willow's lifetime to interact with Sam's side of the family.

Now, in order to access the Peverell Manor, Sam's descendants needed to have the Peverell Family Magic, which they did not. As by the time James Potter and Lily Evans met and married, the Potter family had not only forgotten the fact that their original name was Peverell but that they had a Family Manor with some very impressive wards on it, the newly married cousins did not take up residence in the Family Manor.

Now the reason why a family that had been marred by the stigma of being unable to have their name pronounced correctly – thereby inhibiting Name magic, the likes of which allowed them to swear oaths and receive letters addressed to them – as well as being apparently incapable of accessing their own Family Manor was so highly respected that they earned a Wizengamot seat was very simple. They were some of the most magically powerful wizards and witches around, due to Death entering his genes into their family gene pool. The fact that they were able to survive Muggle invasions and witch hunts until the establishment of the Statute of Secrecy almost four hundred years later without a warded stronghold to hide behind like other families said a lot about their collective strength.

That strength was the reason why the notoriously Dark-aligned Black Family agreed to marry Dorea, the much-younger sister of their Family Head Arcturus, to the then-Heir Potter, Charlus, although that is not particularly relevant to the story of Voldemort's defeat.

Since unlike the Longbottoms – who were a primarily a non-combative family dedicated to warding and nurturing various Potions ingredients commonly found in greenhouses – the Potters both lacked a Family Manor to hide behind and were notoriously powerful, Voldemort decided to attack the less defended couple while his other supporters healed from their most recent skirmish with the combined forces of the Hit Wizards, Aurors, and the Order of the Phoenix. Conveniently enough, he also had a new recruit who could tell him where to find the Potters.

And so, the Dark Lord Folded-shorts went to attack the Potters that fateful night. He killed the Lady Potter and her distant cousin, the Consort-Lord Potter, and then died when he attempted to shoot a killing curse at their daughter, Holly Jasmine Potter.

His killing curse backfired on him because Holly was the current incarnation of Life, and it's impossible to kill Life off. Permanently, anyway, as the killing curse actually erases the victim's soul out of existence (but not history) and prompts their soulmate to be assigned a new soulmate by the Mysterious One True God Who May or May Not Exist. In fact, the deities all agree that the killing curse is an abomination, but none of them have done anything about it. They all keep assuming that someone else will wipe it out of existence.

The moral of this story is that there are three things that are universal: politics, egos, and laziness. Also, discarding squibs has long reaching consequences that may or may not always result in the almost total obliteration of an ancient family!

M-C 4: Wherein Sirius Becomes the Not-So-Proud Owner of a Horde of Talking Llamas and the Marauders' Lives Are Never Quite the Same Again (Different crossover with the same very sketchy Mythology as above, Deities-only Dreaming AU; Warnings: Referenced non-explicit child death at the very end)

"The deities liked to make things. More specifically, they liked to make things in their image. The Wolf god, who went by Fenris made werewolves out of boredom, in an attempt to make human shaped things that turned into furry four-legged canines like him.

Luckily for the continued survival of the human race, the deities have life partners – for a certain definition of life, given that they technically existed in a perpetual state of being neither dead nor alive but instead nonliving. Soulmates would be a good alternative to this phrase, for all that they technically lacked souls – who could and would stop them from doing anything too destructive.

To paraphrase Newton's third law, there is an equal but opposite force for every force there is. This is doubly so with deities for in order to have a deity of Chaos one must have a deity of Order, so that one may know how something is defined as Chaos and how it is defined as Order. If one does not know anything different than what they have, then how can they define what they have?

These partners 'ride herd' on each other, so to speak, thanks to their ability to see what their respective partner is doing. Should the deities of Chaos and Order be in two separate places, when Order sleeps, they will see what Chaos is doing at that moment in time, and vice versa. It is a little like watching a home movie, wherein the viewer is watching the actions of their errant spouse without the aforementioned spouse's knowledge. Except, of course, that this bond works both ways, and so the metaphorical spouses are very aware of the fact that their significant other may or may not be watching them.

"Big Brother is watching" indeed.

Now that I have recorded this explanation of how my kind functions in a compulsive pair-bonding system to my satisfaction, I will go on to explain the true purpose of this entry into my personal logs.

I am Order, deity of Logic, Organization, Reasoning, Sanity, as well as – to a lesser extent – Language, Words, Communication Methods, and other such related things. My partner is Chaos, most commonly called Paradox, deity of Contradictory Ideas, Things, and Places, as well as Insanity and – much to my misfortune – llamas.

Now deities have symbols of power, some common mythological examples being Thor and his hammer or Poseidon and his trident. Mine is a book made of words. It has neither pages nor anything substantial to it, but is a collection of glowing, free-floating words arranged in the shape of a book. I have been informed that my symbol of power appears as though the words have been highlighted in white and are written upon invisible paper.

I do not understand why anyone would write on invisible paper. How would they tell when they are writing on the page and when their pen or pencil has drifted off of it?

Paradox, being the deity of Contradiction, defies the norm with his lack of a predefined symbol of power – that is to say, a symbol of power defined by our very nature. A prime example would be my symbol being a book made entirely of words when I am the deity of Words – and yet he has elected to take up the species of llamas as a whole to be his symbol of power.

It is a very frustrating decision.

To return from my brief jaunt into symbols and Paradox's self-declared symbol, we are well acquainted with several other deities. Our so-called 'friend-group' consists of Struggle and Surrender, Death and Life, as well as the minor deities, Fenris and Vili.

The difference between a higher and lesser deity is the extensiveness of what they represent. Struggle – otherwise known as Survival – for example is all-encompassing. It is a concept that all obey simply by existing, be they plants or animals, sentient beings or less intellectually developed creatures. All creatures are constantly in competition for the same resources and to a lesser extent; Struggle embodies all the factors in Survival – Competition, Pestilence, Famine, even War.

Surrender, his partner, embodies all that is his opposite – Peace, Health, Satiation of Hunger and Thirst, Submission to the stronger predator. Struggle is the pack alpha who forces upstart members to obey his rule. Surrender is the upstart pack member with his tail in between his legs and his throat bared to the alpha.

Because Survival is such a universal concept, Struggle is considered a higher deity – and of course, his polar opposite must be just as omnipresent as he. Our "soulmates" must be on the same level as us, after all, or there would be no balance.

Fenris, god of wolves and patron of werewolves, does not represent an omnipresent concept. The plants do not have a concept of wolves. The animals in the Australian Outback do not have a concept of wolves – other four legged, vaguely canine predators, yes, but not wolves specifically. Therefore, Fenris and by extension Vili are not higher deities.

Another way to think of it would be to consider the following question: Does this deity represent an omnipresent concept or have they been born of the human imagination and the magic of thousands upon thousands of people believing in their existence? The former comes to life by Magic's own will; the latter by humans unknowingly donating their magic to give birth to the very god(s) they worship.

Most recently, Paradox proposed a game, a diversion to the never-ending monotony of eternity. The game? To dress as humans, interact with humans, to assume a human life. The winner would be the one who lasted longest in this human form.

We integrated ourselves with the Wizarding world. The British one, to be exact. I regret that it was necessary, but my dearest would give away the charade if we attended any other as the British Wizarding World was the only without a zoo housing at least one llama. Paradox never could resist cooing over llamas.

We needed to integrate with the magic folk because the magic which is so inherent in us is impossible to restrain for long and we would never be able to hold the guise for long in the mundane world.

We took turns integrating. One pair would integrate first and when both had been outed, the next moved in. The others would attempt to sabotage the pair currently in disguise. We split up and found human families. Once we found these families, we altered their memories until they thought that we had been there all along.

Paradox lasted no more than a week before he outed himself in front of his make-shift family. Predictably enough, he could no longer stand the lack of his 'sacred animal' and conjured a horde of them to keep him company. I do believe that they nearly had a heart attack when they saw him surrounded by a mass of large smelly animals that had not been there a moment beforehand.

I, on the other hand, had decided to infiltrate a family known for their massive libraries. Even if I gained no entertainment, at least I would have read some books, I had reasoned.

The Blacks had a tendency to name themselves after stars, and while I did not understand why – humans are such very odd, inexplicable creatures – I complied with this unspoken rule. I named myself Regulus, after the heart of the constellation Leo, and Arcturus, after my supposed grandfather.

Humans liked to name their children after their aging or dead relatives, right? It was some odd cultural ritual wherein they hoped to fashion their offspring into productive adults like their namesakes, with only their other name to mitigate the reappearance of their namesake's flaws. Heavens help them if both namesakes had the same flaws though.

I had a brother, in this form. He was named Sirius Orion, and despite his name, he was very much like Paradox. Orion, my supposed father, was a very solemn man and one would think that with a name like Sirius, my almost-brother would indeed be serious, but alas that was not the case. Eventually he decided to run away to be in some possibly non-platonic relationship with his cousin and friend James Potter. I say possibly non-platonic as I understand that they were very close and were teenage boys and at that age, when teenagers say that they will be living together, they sometimes seem to be using cohabitation a euphemism for sex.

Humans are very odd about their natural reproductive habits.

Strangely, Life shook her head and sighed when I mentioned this. I did not hear everything she said, but it had something to do with misplaced emphasis in the phrase "they were living together".

I enjoyed going to Hogwarts; the library was very interesting, if disappointingly biased. To my dismay, the Black family library was similarly biased, if in a different direction. Humans seem to have the strangest categories when it comes to classifying magic and the oddest ideas on what is and is not possible.

There were entire shelves dedicated to the Transfiguration, and some man calling himself a Transfiguration Master had made a 'law' stating that food could not be transfigured or conjured. How odd!

My 'superpower', as I would call it had I been a comic-book-esque hero, is to take words – either spoken or written – and convert them into what they describe. When I say "a jar of honey, perfectly edible, that is never empty and whose lid is decorated with a sprig of mint", the words fall glowing from my lips, curl about in the air until they have assumed the shape of a jar with a small mint leaf on its lid, whereupon they glow brighter and condense themselves into a jar of honey exactly as described.

I do not know where these humans have gotten this inane idea that one cannot make food with magic alone, bereft of ingredients, but it is very incorrect. Perhaps misunderstandings like this are what have stunted their growth?

Eventually, shortly after the date of what my pseudo-family considered to be my eighteenth birthday, the so-called Dark Lord demanded that I join him. I refused. He was mortal, I was not, and of course I wasn't going to bow to some immature, half-trained child not even a thousandth of my age.

By that time, I had grown weary of the others' attempts to sabotage my farce of a human life, and I had not seen my partner in some time. I feared for the havoc Paradox was causing without me there to rein him in. I decided to make it seem as though Regulus Black had died.

It was not that difficult. My false 'Mother' and 'Father' had long died. Sirius had not seen me in years and already thought me a 'Death Eater' – and how odd that idea was, to eat Death. He was hardly edible – and a minor adjustment to the glamour over the Black Family Tapestry would assure any onlookers that my nonexistent entry would read deceased. I simply left.

Of course, I was required to put my 'affairs' in order, as far as the humans were concerned, and Narcissa at least had grown attached to me and would worry if I had no will reading. I made several pieces of jewelry and gifted them to her, and then, having no one else I was significantly attached to but wanting to irritate Sirius, I conjured a horde of llamas – in honor of Paradox – and charmed them to endlessly recite Shakespearian love poems at him. This was the extent of my preparations, and thus I retreated from human life.

I'm sure Sirius was appropriately confused.

As soon as I had finished and announced my withdrawal to the others, we tallied up mine and Paradox's combined time. We were three months and a few days short of ten years. It was very impressive, especially because I did most of the work and am wholly uncertain as to how humans normally act.

After I recounted my parting gifts to Narcissa and Sirius, Surrender began to complain. Apparently he and Struggle had had some complex plot for their turn, wherein Surrender would pretend to be Sirius' son from a one-night stand. More specifically, he would be named Orion, son of Diana and Sirius, so that he could fulfill both the Black naming tradition and his imaginary mother's family's tradition of naming children after Greco-Roman mythological characters. Then, following Surrender's introduction to his 'father', Surrender would introduce his very Dark-inclined 'boyfriend' to Sirius. From then on, until the end of their turn, they would pass the time by attempting to give Sirius as many gray hairs as they could.

However, my llama gift had thrown a wrench into their plans. While the aforementioned plans did not account for the fact that any child Sirius had would be five at the oldest, they were thrown off by the simple fact that with the addition of the llamas, Sirius would be much less inclined to have children. According to Life, humans are much less inclined to procreate when they have large animals staring at them and serenading them with oddly phrased poetry.

Who knew?

Although I did have a question – were they intending to masquerade as a couple of five-year olds or else wait a few months and appear as newborns? How exactly were they planning this? When I enquired, their response was that it no longer mattered as their plan had been thoroughly derailed, and they would let someone else take their turn.

It was a very unsatisfactory answer.

Life and Death decided that they would go next, and if we were messing with the self-proclaimed Marauders, then they would interfere with James and Lily Potter, the latter of whom was pregnant with twins.

It was a spectacular disaster.

Peter Pettigrew turned out to have no loyalty, something which was only a problem because he betrayed the Potters and their newborn children to the madman who had approached me only a few months before then. Life had recently installed herself as the Potters' youngest child in a set of triplets, and Death was hovering again.

He always was overprotective like that.

When the Snake Fool arrived, he attempted to point his wand at the crib where all three children were sleeping. Or rather, where the two human kids were sleeping and Life was convincing an invisible-to-mortal-eyes Death to go and pick his human family.

Death, needless to say, did not take the threat to his wife's safety very well. In fact, he killed the man, cooed over Life until she convinced him that she was alright, and then proceeded to spend the next year and a half hunting down and killing the man's Horcruxes. He only returned when he did when he realized that the Snake Fool was clinging to life by a single Horcrux – one that was in Jameson "Jason" Potter, Life's "brother".

He found it intolerable of course. A Horcrux, near his wife? I think that he would have destroyed the boy along with it, except he had realized that James and Lily had – in a spectacular example of why teenagers should not procreate – decided to leave their youngest "child" with Lily's magi-phobic sister. He about had a heart attack when he figured that out and immediately fled to Life's side.

Life, bless her soul, handled her husband's fear with grace. Eventually she convinced her husband to leave and ask us if it was too late for him to adapt a human form, although Death made a point of "chatting" with her relatives before he left. Life's time with them mysteriously got better.

In the end, we decided that there was a six month long due date. If one of us could not find a family in that time period, then that person was out. Their partner would still be allowed to compete, however.

Life's tenure at Hogwarts was considerably more interesting than mine. In her first year, James and Lily suddenly remembered that they had three children and not two – although to be fair, Life was not actually their child.

We sabotaged her meeting with them, although she was able to clean up any messes before her admittedly oblivious human parents noticed. Much to our offense, the only thing she failed to block was Paradox's juvenile need to be surrounded by llamas.

To be fair, I alone seem to be prepared to deal with the eventuality of llamas. Being essentially married to Paradox has taught me much about llamas – namely that where Paradox is concerned, there are always llamas around. Currently, she – for even as I write this, Paradox has decided to adopt a female form – has three pet llamas she insists are our biological children. Their names are Llamallamala the only girl, and her two younger brothers, Llamallamalou and Llamawamawama.

I am surrounded by llamas.

Strangely, people seem to think that I am in need of pity when I mention this. The llamas are large and smelly and Paradox has somehow managed to train them to urinate on people on command, but it is not as though they are a nuisance. I am perfectly capable of preventing their urine from reaching me should they attempt to soil my clothing – and it's not as though I cannot clean my clothing either – and any of my papers that they consume can be easily reconstructed.

The same people who believe I need to be pitied seem to think that the llamas' presence everywhere is a problem. It is not. Deities do not need to eat nor sleep, and if having llamas staring at us as we watch movies in bed makes Paradox happy, then so am I.

Besides, allowing the little things makes Paradox more agreeable on the bigger issues.

Returning to the subject of our game, Paradox summoned a horde of llamas with luridly bright pink and purple lipstick and obviously fake eyelashes on in the middle of the street. They immediately began to sing a rendition of Disney's "Kiss the Girl" from the movie The Little Mermaid.

Luckily for Life, Sirius had come up to see his friends and godchildren, and the surrounding people assumed that the ridiculous looking llamas were part of his ever-present entourage. He was a known prankster, so it was a fair assumption that he had dressed them up to be annoying.

Sirius has an admirable dedication to attempting to irritate people. That I remained unflappable in the face of this dedication has always inspired him to try harder. In this, at least, I am assured that I was blending in with the humans properly. Encouraging one's "siblings" to excel at something they love is proper behavior, after all. I do believe the expression on Sirius's face when I suggested he pour urine instead of pumpkin juice over one's essays was a look of delight that I was encouraging him.

Everyone else is of the opinion that he was bewildered by my lack of concern for my ruined essays, which were simple enough to repair. Paradox alone believes me when I say that he was stunned into silence by his joy.

Strangely, Paradox was cackling when she said she believed me, but she has an odd sense of humor so I ignored it. Sirius's dedication towards irritating people is very similar to Paradox's, actually, which is why I like him – and decided to favor him with talking llamas rather than floating sharks as I had originally considered doing.

He may have actually been fired from his job because of my llamas, now that I think of it. Hm. How strange. I will never understand humans.

The llamas aren't that bad. I've been living with them since the race came into being, and the worst they have done is decide to procreate while standing on top of my research papers and be terribly inconsiderate about letting me fetch them.

According to The Trials and Tribulations of Social Etiquette, such behavior is considered "rude" and "socially unacceptable". Sadly, as helpful as this book is, it does not have guidelines for every situation. However, I have persevered and extrapolated that if allowing one's pet(s) to urinate on someone else's furniture is "rude", and if fornicating in public is considered "rude", then Paradox's llamas procreating on my valuable research should also be considered socially unacceptable.

Ah well. I have already talked to Paradox about it, and she has promised to prevent the llamas from procreating on my papers, so all is well now.

At any rate, Paradox's llamas were dismissed as Sirius being funny and summarily ignored, so Life went about on her day. She collected her school supplies with no further fanfare and off she went to Hogwarts.

There she faced a troll – killed soon after she encountered it by Death – and a man possessed by the remnants of the Snake Fool. He was no match for Life's inability to die and was turned into fertilizer for her Herbology class.

I don't think the staff ever figured out what happened to "Quirrelmort" as Paradox called him. Jason certainly didn't do anything, and Rose Potter, his twin, fainted upon entering the last chamber.

Speaking of chambers, the Chamber of Ssheekresss opened in Life's second year at Hogwarts. Ssheekresss was the name of Salazar Slytherin's basilisk. In Parseltongue – the language of serpents and understandable to me due to my being the deity of Languages – Ssheekresss means "Gem" or "Jewel". Most people are not Parselmouths, however, and misinterpret her name as "Secrets".

Jason, of course, attempted to kill the poor darling. Life knocked him out and left him with an equally unconscious Rose.

It would seem that the blond-haired fop Lockhart was secretly a Parselmouth who had been Imperiusing girls and taking them down to the Chamber of Ssheekresss to sacrifice them to Ssheekresss. He had some ridiculous idea that stealing other people's achievements was no longer enough and that he needed to perform some "act of heroism" to increase his book sales and popularity even more.

Luckily, he knew nothing about Hogwarts' wards. When the students enter the halls for the first time, the crest on their robes activates a ward that places them under the castle protections. All four Founders had pets, and these pets were tied magically to the castle wards. Any student under the castle protections would be made invulnerable to the not-so-metaphorical bite and bark of the castle's living protectors. This protection would wear off after their seventeenth birthday, when their magical majority came along and the castle could no longer sustain the protection without mangling their magical cores.

In Ssheekresss's case, the students could only be Petrified but not killed if they looked into her eyes, and them being poisoned would set off an alarm that would immediately call Amber to the student to neutralize the poison.

Amber is, of course, Helga's pet Phoenix. Headmaster Beard-man seems to think that she's both a male and his familiar, but that isn't correct. Amber is the most mobile of the four Defenders, as the Founders' pets are called, hence the reason why she is the one to watch the Headmasters to ensure that they don't endanger the children.

However, in relatively recent times, she has laid a clutch of eggs, which require their mother to watch them for the three to four centuries it will take them to hatch. For the past several Headmasters' tenure, she has withdrawn from her watching of the Headmasters in order to tend to them.

When Headmaster Beard-man became the Headmaster, however, she left her clutch to supervise him. All of that time with Grindelwald left an alarmingly black streak on his magic, and as one of the Defenders of the children, she could not allow him to roam about the school unchecked.

Her clutch, by that point, was close enough to hatching that she did not need to spend all of her time watching the eggs, but she did leave them with Spinel. Spinel is Gryffindor's pet Griffin, and the warmest of the other three Defenders, not including Amber herself.

To return to Life's second year, Ssheekresss had refused to harm the multiple students Lockhart had been Imperiusing into coming to her. Unfortunately, as there was nothing she could do to help them short of killing Lockhart and the fop was at least smart enough to not come down there himself and to be wary of walking around corners, she could do nothing.

Eventually Lockhart grew arrogant enough to target one of the Potter children and desperate enough to come down there himself. Jason found out and dragged his friends – sans bookworm, who had been Petrified after being dragged down there and looking into Ssheekresss's eyes, and plus Life, who seemed to be Jason's backup plan for adventuring – and mistakenly assumed that Ssheekresss needed to be killed.

Lockhart was put into Azkaban when James and Lily found out what he had been planning on doing to their baby girl, and life went on. With no one the wiser as the fact that Hogwarts was home to a basilisk, of course. We couldn't have someone trying to kill off one of the Defenders, after all.

For her third year, it was eventually discovered that Barty Crouch Junior – whoever he was – was madder than a hatter and had somehow managed to escape Azkaban, only to disappear into parts unknown. After a series of attacks on Gryffindor Tower, it was assumed that he was attempting to get back at Jason for the defeat of the Snake Fool and a team of Aurors was assigned to guard Hogwarts.

Of course, the truth ended up being that Jason's friend had a pet rat that was actually the long-missing Pettigrew, who hadn't been seen since the day after the Snake Fool died and his once-friends denounced him as a Death Eater.

Pettigrew had been contacted by Junior and blackmailed into helping him get a sample of Jason's blood, but hadn't been able to return to human form to do so due to his open arrest-warrant. Instead, he'd been stuck sneaking around in rat form to get the blood, but had encountered some problems.

After the previous year, the Defenders had started cracking down on threats to the student populace and had recruited the portraits, ghosts, house elves, and armor suits to do so. They had discovered that Pettigrew was still a threat to the students, and after the Fat Lady's confession that the self-proclaimed Marauders were Animagi and Pettigrew specifically was a rat, they had started corralling rats and vermin towards the Astronomy Tower.

There, Spinel and Citrine – Ravenclaw's Sphinx friend – would examine the vermin to ensure that they weren't Pettigrew. Any diseased vermin were sent to Ssheekresss to be killed. Any that were fine were sent to a different classroom in the tower, where they were guarded by Mrs. Norris, Crookshanks, and Amber until Pettigrew was found. With this anti-rat crusade going in the castle, Pettigrew wasn't able to get back into Gryffindor Tower.

Finally, Jason went out on the night of the full moon to comfort Hagrid and discovered Pettigrew in his hiding place. Pettigrew took them back over to the Shrieking Shack – long devoid of its lupine occupant but now home to Life when she needed space – and attempted to obtain the blood he needed.

To put it shortly, he didn't succeed.

Unfortunately, a bunch of children were not prepared to fight someone like Pettigrew, not without the then-absent Life's interference, at least. Although the Aurors arrived in time to prevent him from seriously harming the children, Rose was – once again – knocked unconscious and the redhead who had been secretly harboring the fugitive had broken his leg. Junior reappeared briefly – for apparently the Shrieking Shack was outside of the anti-Apparation wards – and took Pettigrew before either of them could be apprehended.

He reappeared the next year, of course. Apparently he had disguised himself as Mad-Eye Moody and entered Jason into the Triwizard Tournament. He entered Rose in as well for no readily discernable reason – except possibly spite, although what he had against a vapid girl whose only contribution to Pettigrew's near-defeat the previous year was to pass out, I don't know – and attempted to enter Life.

It failed.

You can't enter someone into a binding contract without their true name, and despite what she made everyone think, Harriet Gretchen Potter was not actually Life's real name.

Astoundingly enough, both Jason and Rose lived to see the final task. The process of getting to that point involved fighting dragons – Jason outflew his and Rose employed multiple mirrors in confusing and blinding her dragon, thus proving that her time spent working on her makeup did in fact have an ulterior purpose beyond making her look like a clown missing half her face – attending a Yule ball – wherein Jason drooled over his unfortunate date's dress robes…while staring at another girl, and Rose similarly ignored the redhead from the previous year entirely as she mooned over her new crush – and saving their respective unfortunate dates from hypothermia a la Black Lake in wintertime.

The final task was to obtain a trophy hidden deep within a maze grown on the Quidditch pitch. In there, someone Imperiused the Bulgarian celebrity into attacking the veela girl, and the three Hogwarts champions decided to race for the trophy.

Or, well, the males decided to. Rose decided that that was the perfect time to confess her love for the older student and tackled him from behind in order to get his attention. Her brother's priorities apparently listed winning over saving some poor unfortunate soul from his sister's clutches and extravagant wedding plans, because he ignored this and continued to charge for the cup.

He was taken off somewhere and Pettigrew, the current caretaker of the strange not-baby thing the Snake Fool had become while Junior was playing dress-up at Hogwarts, finally succeeded in taking his blood.

It took him long enough. My guesses about Pettigrew's competence were grossly overstated.

The Snake Fool was resurrected following this, although Jason managed to escape back to Hogwarts, where that poor Hufflepuff was still suffering through Rose's attention. She had moved onto describing how many children they would have, what their names were, and what they'd look like. Other than that, I don't believe they'd moved at all since he'd left.

Eventually they all managed to return to the Champion's podium, where Jason was declared the Champion and he stepped up to make an impassioned speech, not about winning like most people expected him to, but about the Snake Fool's impending reign of terror.

The Minister was so horrified by this news that he actually attempted to have him arrested for treason.

Fifth year was when things started to go downhill. For the rest of the world, I mean. Somebody had the gall to send Dementors after Life, likely thinking that they could destabilize the Potter family's political standing if their daughter had her wand snapped for breaking the Statute of Secrecy.

Oh, the Potters probably would have started putting their Wizengamot seat to good use overturning that decision, but by then they would have had almost no political capital and their reputation would have been in tatters.

Luckily for them, Life's accomplishments include many things – like giving birth to the Dementors. They were delighted to see their mother again and made no motions to harm anyone. In fact, they, Life, and Death went out to eat at a local restaurant. The Dementors were disguised as kids wearing cloaks, which they enthusiastically told the amused waitress was their Halloween costume and their "big brother and big brother's girlfriend" said that they got to wear it early.

It was an adorable sight, one that none of us had the heart to interrupt.

Life, both metaphorical and not, went on again, unperturbed by the foiling of those nebulous people's plots. When fifth year started and the Toad attempted to find fault with the Potter children, Jason was easily sent to detention for back talking, and Rose was caught stalking that poor Hufflepuff from the Tournament – he'd apparently turned seventeen just before the Champions were picked but had still been a sixth year at the time – and was also sent to detention.

Life herself behaved perfectly, avoiding detentions and being caught around unruly behavior easily. It got to the point where the Toad was considering keeping her for detention over the length of her essays, changing what length they were without telling anybody in order to catch Life.

She never did. Christmas break rolled around before she could, and while she was home for the break she mysteriously suffered a heart attack and died. The rest of the term was dominated by an ever-changing assortment of Aurors who were supposedly there to keep the peace while the student body grieved for the Toad – which nobody did; in fact, most people celebrated – but were in reality sent to control the students.

It didn't stop Jason and Rose and their friends from forming Dumbledore's Army, but they didn't get caught since the Aurors were exchanged for other Aurors every few days and nobody realized that they were patrolling the same routes over and over again.

Admittedly, this was Paradox's work; she loved the chaotic atmosphere the castle had, with its changing staircases and the never-ending maze of hallways. Seeing someone attempt to put a leash on it irritated her – experience says that I alone can tame her chaos, so long as I placate her beforehand and allow some measure of chaos to remain behind; she prefers controlled chaos over none after all – and she lashed out by twisting the passages into circuits and placing glamours on things to make it appear as though the scenery was changing.

Somebody might have noticed what she was doing, but since the Aurors kept being switched out, nobody was actually there long enough to notice that the hall decorations started repeating after a while and that they were going in circles.

The students, at least, thought it was funny.

At the end of their fifth year, Jason got a vision from the Horcrux still lodged in his forehead; Death having never gotten around to removing it, though he had been rid of the other six. He foresaw his parents being tortured to death in the Department of Mysteries and ran off to save them. Rose followed him – at this point it may have been habit that had her following her brother on his hare-brained adventures – leaving behind a very grateful Hufflepuff who immediately went and proposed to his long-time, long-suffering girlfriend who had had to put up with Rose attempting to steal her boyfriend and Jason attempting to get her to date him.

I'm fairly certain she accepted, but at that moment Life went to follow her "siblings" and I had more important things to do than watch teenagers take each other's clothes off.

Also, according to chapter nine of The Trials and Tribulations of Social Etiquette, watching others procreate is considered socially unacceptable.

We went to watch as Life attempted to get the Potter twins to see sense – they didn't – and then resigned herself to following them. Once they arrived, they encountered Andromeda Tonks. I was surprised to see my "cousin" there, but was pleased to note that she seemed to be doing fine.

She mentioned that her daughter was attempting to convince the werewolf Sirius was friends with to date her, and accompanied them to the Floo Network in order to call their parents. Just as they were informed that their parents were indeed still alive and well at home, the Snake Fool and his newly-released posse arrived at the Ministry.

The first thing they did was kill Andromeda. Vili and I were distraught. I was dismayed for hopefully obvious reasons. Vili, on the other hand, had taken a liking to Andromeda in those few minutes he'd known her – unsurprisingly, he was fond of her no-nonsense attitude as it was like his brother Ve's and Vili was very close to that brother.

After they killed Andromeda, James and Lily threw themselves through their fireplace and began fighting off the Snake Posse. One of the men on the other side of the fireplace – likely Sirius' werewolf friend – went to alert the "Order" while the other one went to inform Headmaster Beard-man.

Soon, their reinforcements showed up and the fight became much less one sided. Somehow, Jason and Rose managed to flee down into the Hall of Prophecies and picked up one that was complete hogwash. Life followed them, and anyone who followed her met her husband in an unpleasantly final way.

In the end, Andromeda and the prophecy were the only casualties on Jason's side, the latter having been destroyed before the Snake Fool could hear it.

Death fussed terribly over his wife afterwards, and when he wasn't, he was complaining that nobody should depend on the prophecy. It was hopelessly vague, and I agree – we've heard prophecies that have more substance than that one and they've never been anything but rambling madness said in a spooky voice.

Unfortunately, the humans believed it.

Life's sixth year was nerve-wracking for the humans. Their Ministry had finally admitted that the Snake Fool was still alive. People were now dying and panicking – sometimes even simultaneously.

Through it all, Life remained an ocean of patience and calm, a shelter from the storm to her "siblings."

Jason was getting some ultimately useless and uselessly cryptic lessons on the history of the Snake Fool's Horcruxes, but not a word on where to find them. It would have been a waste of time anyway, even if he'd been given a map and compass. There was only one left, and that one was in his head.

Rose, for her part, seemed determined to find a balance between having a normal life and being able to defend herself in the case of emergency. She had abandoned her pursuit for the now-graduated Hufflepuff – who had made it very obvious that he didn't want her by getting his fiancé pregnant – and had instead taken to hounding her dorm mates for tips on beauty and hair care. In return, she showed them how to beat someone in a quick-draw duel and cast shield charms nearly strong enough to ward off dragon fire.

At one point towards the end of the year, Jason and Headmaster Beard-man went to destroy one of the Horcruxes. It was a stupidly pointless move that Life repeatedly warned Jason away from, but she refrained from explaining why to her "brother", who wanted an actual explanation before deciding.

While they were gone, the Snake Fool invaded the castle and took over. Rose and Jason's friends escaped at the last minute and Jason returned in time to see the Vengeful Bat-Man-Child kill Headmaster Beard-man.

Life took pity on Jason and took him away before he could be killed as well.

Everybody went into hiding for the summer. Sirius, with his horde of llamas in tow, cleaned up and out Grimmauld Place, ensuring that it no longer had any "dark" artifacts. It's a mostly useless endeavor – by the British Ministry of Magic's definition of necromancy, most portraits and moving photographs are considered necromantic in origin. They do affect the soul after all – how else would one animate them without sealing an imprint of the photographed person's soul into the canvas?

At any rate, the Order of Mostly Useless Adults convened in Grimmauld Place and attempted to do something to solve their current issue. Like Sirius' attempt to clean Grimmauld Place up, this was a useless endeavor. They ultimately sat around and wrung their hands.

It was all terribly boring.

Eventually Jason came clean about the Horcruxes and the Order set about attempting to destroy them. They managed to locate Slytherin's locket, which had already been cleaned of its former occupant and earned the eternal devotion of Kreacher.

He seemed to have some kind of fanciful notion that I had died trying to retrieve it. I don't pretend to understand how he got that idea; I have never touched nor seen that thing since Salazar Slytherin himself was still alive.

My friends are most unsympathetic about my plight. When I protested this misunderstanding, they began to laugh. Even Paradox seemed to find it amusing. She seemed to take great joy in my bewilderment, although she also mentioned that I had an adorable pout.

I was not aware that I was pouting. I did not intend to make that face.

At any rate, Life suggested that the Snake Fool had a fetish for Founder's artifacts, although she didn't use those exact terms, and there may be clues in the Hogwarts library. James Potter grimly announced – presumably in response to his "youngest" which is quite the feat given that he and his wife had a vaguely alarming tendency to ignore their "child" in what would be a time of need had she been a mortal like them – that Hogwarts was lost to the Snake Fool's forces and that they would need to make due with whatever information they could recall.

Impressively enough, before the summer's end the Order had managed to figure out which items were Horcruxes. They discounted the Sword of Gryffindor since Jason had already found it and assumed that the Snake Fool would never touch Gryffindor's artifact as he was a Slytherin.

I found this to be very shoddy reasoning. He disregarded Hufflepuffs and still made a Horcrux out of Hufflepuff's cup. There was no reason why he couldn't do the same to Gryffindor's sword.

There was a brief confused pause as everyone attempted to figure out where and why Jason had found the Sword of Gryffindor. After a moment, Life tweaked their memories and they all stopped worrying about it. Surrender attempted to alter their memories again to out Life, but she had cleverly placed a barrier around them to prevent any tampering.

I do believe that they now thought that Jason had confronted Rose while she was under the blond teacher's Imperius and Jason had been disarmed, only for Amber to show up with the Sorting Hat and Jason withdrew the sword and forcibly disarmed the useless blond.

When Life's seventh year started, she went on back to Hogwarts. Rose stayed with her parents and Jason went off on an unsanctioned quest to destroy the Horcruxes. There, in the halls of Hogwarts, Life reigned supreme.

Much to the immense confusion of the resident Snake followers, no curse reached the students. They could toss Unforgiveables around as they pleased, but the spells would dissipate before they reached the target. Life placed wards around any student wearing the Hogwarts crest or colors and they remained immune to the murder attempts.

The Snake followers, on the other hand, were terrible teachers. I disapproved greatly of their inclusion in the staff of an institution of learning.

They did not remain for long. Life steadily whittled away at their power base, aiding the members of the DA in their silent war against the abusive staff. By the end of the Christmas holidays, the Snake Fool had gained control of the Ministry but despite all attempts to rein in the student body of Hogwarts, he had not won over the children.

Not even three months after New Year's Day had passed – bringing with it the Snake Fool's final, permanent visit to the school and his inclusion as the self-proclaimed supreme overlord of Hogwarts – Jason returned to Hogwarts.

Life's "brother" had managed to waste almost an entire school year doing absolutely nothing, yet he had finally cottoned on to the fact that there was a Horcrux in his head. Ultimately his return did nothing but prompt the Snake Fool to order him to show himself, or the entire student population – then locked in the Great Hall because for some strange reason they were still acting like school was continuing as normal when they were not very subtly waging war against their teachers – would be executed.

Well. That did not work very well for anybody.

Jason did show himself and was promptly hit by a Killing Curse, which destroyed the last Horcrux. The four Defenders, at this signal, decided to show their true nature and more or less ended the entire battle in fell swoop.

The Snake followers were not very prepared to deal with angry, murderous, ancient Beasts that were very happy to kill off all of the interlopers. I do believe that the Defenders had only waited as long as they had so that they could kill off everyone in fell swoop with none of the opposition the wiser.

There was always the stray survivor that went off and warned the others of what to expect. By waiting – and letting Life protect all of the children so that they didn't have to worry them – they allowed themselves to gain a better understanding of their opponents' fighting styles – which Struggle said is a smart thing to do, especially when confronted by a large number of opponents. They also ensured that no one had any idea that they were there.

I rather agree with Paradox, in that the expressions of bewildered horror on the Snake followers' faces when the Defenders revealed themselves were most entertaining.

After the expected alarm over the appearance of the Defenders was tentatively over – some people could not bear to face any of them, and continued to panic – there was a period of mourning. Several people had died, including one of the redheaded twins that provided Paradox so much amusement. Also among the dead was Remus Lupin, Sirius' werewolf friend. He left behind a pregnant metamorphmagus who also happened to be Andromeda's daughter.

Life, after discreetly making certain that everyone in her make-shift family was alive, decided to leave the humans behind. She returned to her husband's side and formally withdrew from her turn. When we tallied up hers and Death's score, she had beat Paradox and I by more than seven years.

Her human "family" seemed distraught to realize that she was "dead" – she, of course, wasn't but a simple illusion had them seeing her corpse and a mild alteration to it gave it the appropriate amount of weight so they could have a proper burial. Of course, once the funeral was over and the corpse out of sight, the illusion dissipated. There was no use in continuing it when there was no one to see it after all.

Currently, we are awaiting the "birth" of Remus Lupin's child. The original child died some months back, when the wife of the lupine Marauder was discreetly hit by a charm from a dying Snake follower during the so-called Battle of Hogwarts. The charm did not hurt her, lacking much of the power needed to do so due to its caster's weakening state, but it was nevertheless enough to kill the child.

Vili decided to take pity on her and took the place of her child – with Life's help because inserting one's self into a womb is considerably more difficult than simply being formed there naturally. Fenris has gone off to locate the appropriate family to integrate with, and so, in his absence, we patiently await the "birth" of Lupin's "son".

The next round of the game is about to begin.

M-C 5: Wherein Death is Universal, Being Mastered by Death is the World's Most Thankless Job Ever, and Pop Culture References Make Everything Marginally More Tolerable (Blink-and-You-Miss-It-Minor Crossovers with Marvel Movies, Miraculous: Ladybug and Cat Noir, Star Wars, Anime Magical Girl Fashion in general, and other too-numerous-to-count fandoms)

When Dumb-as-a-Door told me the legend of the three brothers, he said that the person who collected them would be the Master of Death. Well, I collected them and that's really not what happened.

My name's Rowan Absinthe – don't ask why; my boss just has a really screwed up sense of humor, and apparently renaming subordinates is a privilege in this job – and I was once Harry Jordan Potter.

You might have heard of my parents or my siblings. James and Lily Potter nearly died fighting off the Dark Lord Nose-less way back in 1981 and then they went on to raise the beautiful, benevolent, and graceful Rose Mary Potter, and her younger brother the handsome, elegant, generous, and all-powerful Jameson "Jason" Canis Potter. Otherwise known as the Lord, Lady and Heiress Potter and the Boy-Who-Lived.

You probably haven't heard of me.

What people don't say is that, back in 1981, Nose-less was so worried about how much power he would need to overpower the prophecy, he didn't even stop to kill James and Lily. He just stunned them. He ignored Rose – because the prophecy clearly stated that the Chosen Child was a boy and Rose was obviously a girl – and aimed at the older of us two boys.

Let me get this straight right here and now. This isn't some sob story about how my siblings stole my Heirship and my title as the vanquisher of Nose-less the incompetent snake man. Rose's destiny was to go down in history as the beautiful Heiress and later Lady Potter who married her soulmate, the dutiful if slightly boring Percival Weasley. Jason's was to defeat Nose-less and marry his slightly vapid but still very competent soulmate Lavender Potter nee Brown.

Mine? Mine was to pick up after my friends and family until I picked up the Deathly Hallows and got conscripted into what can only be described as a Bureaucratic Nightmare without all the paperwork.

When Nose-less attacked the eldest Potter son, the backlash should have killed me. Rose was in a different crib – Lily had made it clear to James and Sirius that her daughter would not be sharing a bed with two boys even as an infant. Jason deflected the magic away from himself, and the soul shard should have latched onto me.

Except it didn't.

My destiny was not a destiny at all but instead a series of seriously improbable paradoxes. See, in 1997, I picked up the Deathly Hallows, and Death appeared to me and said something to the effect of, "Thank god you finally showed up. This has gotten so far out of control I think we may actually get paperwork involved, and the paperwork only gets involved when the situation is DEFCON-2. Or maybe DEFCON-5. I don't know; I'm literally so overworked right now I can't even keep my pop culture references straight."

Then he kidnapped me, told me that I had "horrible clothes, honestly it's like you went dumpster diving at the funeral home's corpse outfitting reject bin" and stuck me into some kind of bizarre outfit that I now know was inspired by too much anime. For someone who is perpetually busy, overworked, and behind schedule, Death always has time for a five-hour-long Magical Girl anime binge. The creators of Puella Magi Madoka Magica had better be grateful for all of his patronage, because I think I might just go insane if no one benefits from Death's bouts of laziness.

My welcome to basic training gift was a gold chain that had several charms on it and a vague explanation that unclipping the coffin charms and tossing them would open a literal doorway to my destination, the hourglass charms would let me travel any which way through time, and unhooking the chain from my belt and slinging one end around would turn it into an inescapable set of restraints. Also, I should stop giving him that bewildered look, because he was being nice and letting me stay a guy and even keeping me away from the Dementors.

Then he chucked me through time and made me work on all of his backlog. Every. Single. Case.

Now this is all very relevant information because being the Master of Death isn't actually being the Master of Death. Being Mastered by Death would be a more accurate description.

Death has no Master, but he does have to keep track of and deal with every single death, including non-human deaths. Now, with sentient creatures like humans and werewolves and centaurs and whatnot, there's a lot of work involved.

Every single soul must be accounted for. They must be judged and sent to the appropriate after-life destination. Bad people go to the fiery pit. Good people go to the shiny place. People – by which I mean nearly everybody – who are just "blah" their entire lives and do nothing outstanding in either a good or bad way are reincarnated until they do something that lands them in either the shiny place or the fiery pit.

It seems very simple, until you realize that Death is universal. No, I don't mean he can travel between dimensions. I mean, he probably could if he wanted to, but then the work would pile up and he'd never get anything done, so he doesn't.

Hey, even the personification of death needs time to watch Captain America: Civil War, you know.

But the problem with being universal is that everything from human deaths to animal deaths to freaking plant deaths needs to be accounted for. Every single blade of grass a cow eats? Death has to oversee that. The cow dies and is cut up for food? Death needs to oversee that. The people who eat the meat get food poisoning and die? Death's job, all the way.

So, yeah. Backlog. Death was accounting for everything and it wasn't working. He has a system for a reason.

The plant and animal deaths are harder to manage than sentient creature deaths, so he keeps a mental list of all the humans who have died and the appropriate place to send them: onwards to the "next great adventure", to the shiny place, or to the fiery pit. The list, he gives to us in the sentient creature afterlife department; everything else, he manages by himself.

That's one perk of being a god, I guess. Infinite multitasking. Must be nice.

So his system goes thusly. He handles all of the non-sentient deaths and the making of the lists of the sentient dead and their destinations.

The Lethifolds – darling, efficient, responsible creatures that they are – handle all of the "Purgatory" blah people. They literally swallow the souls of the blah person, and instead of hitting their stomachs, the soul of the blah person is reborn. And the Ministry wonders what they eat.

The good people meet the Grims and have their souls led – gently! – to the shiny place. See, Professor Trelawney? I always knew you were inherently wrong. The Grims are a good omen of death, not a bad one.

The Dementors – whom I always knew were trouble – swallow the souls of the bad people. Yep. You heard that right. Those irresponsible demons have the real-life equivalent of the Christian Hell substituting for their stomachs. Aren't you glad that you never saw what's under the rest of their cloaks?

And, yes, those hooded creatures are irresponsible. With the exception of Sokovia – oh, Sokovia. You suffered such a horrible fate in the Marvel movies, but don't worry; I've redeemed you by naming one of my most capable subordinates after you – all of the Dementors are incompetent. They've gotten it into their heads that since the Aurors have herded them to Azkaban, they have a valid excuse to not do their jobs.

Wrong!

They can only take the souls of the people Death has designated on their mentally uploaded list and only at the times he has included for that specific person. They do not get to have a "vacation" and terrorize people. They do not get to eat the souls of anybody else. They do not get to eat people on their list prematurely. They do not get retirement benefits!

Nobody gets retirement benefits! There is no such thing as retiring or quitting or vacation time. We are behind schedule as it is; we can't afford to lose anybody else for any amount of time. Case in point – just look at what me being gone for seventeen years did!

See, when my brother deflected that curse, Death himself showed up, whined about how Fate is even more of a prissy she-dog than anybody ever thinks she is, and redirected the backlash onto Jason. He handcrafted the Horcrux to be just resilient enough to withstand the Basilisk venom when Jason was/would be/is twelve, yet breakable enough to crumble at that final Killing Curse during the Battle of Hogwarts.

He then stayed around to watch as Dumb-as-a-Door convinced James and Lily – naïve not-quite-teenagers that they were – that giving up me, their youngest, was a good idea. Granted, Fate and Death both had a little hand in that decision. Paradoxical destiny and all that, you see.

When he dropped me off at the Dursleys' Death stayed to stop me from freezing to death during the night. Once Petunia found me he departed.

And so, in a pitiful, emotionally-desolate wasteland that I reluctantly called home, I learned how to be self-sufficient. I learned how to throw a punch and when to pick my battles. I learned the basis of mundane society, boring as it was. I learned how to clean and pick up after people.

I needed to learn all of this. At age seventeen, long ingrained habits had me picking up the discarded Resurrection Ring and the broken Elder Wand. At age seventeen, I was thrown into a world that was no more familiar than the Magical World was at age eleven, for all that it had elements of a familiar life wound into it.

At age seventeen, I discovered that nine hundred years ago, and hundreds of thousands of years into my future, I would make the Deathly Hallows. I would set the trap that I would fall into.

As the so-called Master of Death, I was immortal. But I was not a god. I did not have the infinite multi-tasking ability, nor could I create new creatures. But I could not be killed by anything save for in that brief period of time between when I was born and when I picked up my brother's mess.

At age seventeen, Death told me I had a horrible fashion sense, made me a "uniform", and sent me to oversee the sentient creature afterlife department.

The Lethifolds are a godsend. They do their job and never stray, even when they are young. The Grims stray when they are puppies, and when they stray and unintentionally ditch their charges, they leave behind ghosts. Ghosts are the undead embodiment of how far behind schedule we are. Luckily, the Grims grow out of this ditching-the-good-souls phase.

The Dementors are adorable in a creepy way when they're babies. They listen to instructions and do everything they're told to do and have no mouths until they hit the equivalent of teenager-hood. Then they are possessed by teenage rebellion and they never come out of it, even when they reach adulthood. Even the oldest Dementor, the "firstborn", is still in the throes of teenage rebellion!

The sole exception is Sokovia. He's one of the younger Dementors but is so hard-working that I actually felt compelled to give him a name.

See, all of these creatures are Death's creations, but my children, in a sense. As Death, he has no ability to create something, only to end it. He cannot rely on other deities, fickle though they are, for their power would cause the creature to belong to them.

I am the sole exception. He feeds me the outline, the template, and I supply the power. Since I am magically tied to him, but am not actually Death, I can "pour" my power into his mold and create the creatures he needs. It takes a lot out of me, though, and I have to wait several centuries – of my time, which doesn't always match up with the rest of the world's timeline – before I can do that again.

Like I said earlier, I'm not a god. I need recharge time after I do this. That and a spa day, but we have too much work to do for me to get one.

And before you say something about how spa days are a girl thing and boys aren't supposed to want spa days, I'm going to tell you right here and now that you're wrong. Firstly, that sexist. Guys can want to be pampered too and manicures and pedicures aren't girls only. If Itachi from Naruto can paint his nails, then so can other guys, and they don't need the long hair and tragic, morbid backstory to do so.

Secondly, sometimes I have to go fetch souls too. There are some people that Fate and Time and all those other godly jerks absolutely adore, and when they inevitably die, the aforementioned godly jerks want "someone special" to go take them to the shiny place. Now, not all of them are necessarily shiny place material and Death doesn't make exceptions for them, but he does send me to pick them up. Having me do it tends to marginally lessen the inevitable tantrums when the now-deceased person fails to go to the shiny place.

That doesn't stop them from having a tantrum, but at least they won't threaten godly war, and it's Death's responsibility to deal with them anyway. Hey, I may be his second-in-command, but a politician I am not. Especially when it comes to godly politics.

But this all loops back to the spa day thing because, for some ridiculous reason, people freak out and try to run away when they see a guy coming to take them to their respective afterlife. Remember, dead people running away when you come to take them to the afterlife results in ghosts. Ghosts are bad with a capital B, A, and D. Now, these same people are willing to follow nicely when a girl picks them up, especially when it's a young, pretty girl who comes along.

I don't know, maybe all people are secretly perverts when they die, or maybe they think that young, pretty girl equals someone who can be easily convinced to let them live longer. I really don't know and I really don't care. What I care about is that this makes my job easier.

So yeah, when I first started working for Death, he told me to stop giving him that baffled, are-you-crazy-get-away-from-me-you-weirdo-where-did-you-even-come-from look. He told me that he was being nice enough to let me stay a guy. And yeah, he was being nice by doing that, because if he gender-flipped me on my first day I would have spent a heck of a lot longer freaking out than I already did.

Death gender-flips me a lot. Sometimes it's so that I can get my in-person soul-collecting visits done faster, and other times it's so that we can make more helpers for him. Apparently, women's magic is different than men's magic in that women's magic is actually adapted to help create magical children.

Squibs are born when a woman's magic has trouble passing down to her womb and building a magical core inside the child, and first generation magic wielders are technically all born from at least one squib parent, since they can't get magic if the dredges of magic in their mother fail to build the core in them. If what little magic their grandmother passed down to their mother fails to take inside the fetus, then the fetus is another squib. If the magic does take, then they are called a first gen wizard or witch. Whether or not the father has magic is irrelevant since the mother is the only one who passes on the talent for magic to the child.

Ha, take that, patriarchal society!

Since we're building magical creatures and I'm the one supplying the magic for them, I have to be in a form that actually allows for giving magic to others. Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. I told you that you could call these creatures my children, didn't I? Of course, there's no pregnancy or intercourse involved – it's a little like having one of those plastic sandcastle buckets and filling it with sand at the beach, before pulling the bucket off to reveal the finished product. The plastic bucket is Death's template, the sand is my magic, and the finished product is whatever creature we were making.

And before you ask, no, that was not a metaphor for anything else.

To return to the spa day subject, Death gender-flips me often. Sometimes it's for work, other times it's for helper-making, but sadly most times it's for fun.

Remember how I said that my uniform was inspired by too much anime? Yeah, Death likes to change the "company uniform" even though we're the only ones who actually wear clothes, barring the Dementors, who wear cloaks so nobody gets traumatized by their stomachs. They have the Christian Hell for bellies, you know.

Death would – in a another life, in a galaxy far, far away; yes that was both a Star Wars reference and a Katy Perry reference – be a fashion designer, probably for some anime or manga making company. He insists on taking time off work to, and I quote, "redesign the old, outdated, horribly unfashionable company uniform because nobody wears this anymore Rowan, don't give me that look, we look like hippies and hippies aren't fashionable anymore!"

He's gone through many phases, although thankfully he has never gone through a Victorian Era fashion phase. The closest we've ever gotten to the high frilly collars and twelve layers of clothes of Victorian Era royal fashion was a steampunk phase. I spent that one almost perpetually female so he could put me in the skirts.

In case you haven't figured this out yet, my boss is awful. In the 1400s he got us a marriage license that I'm pretty sure is invalid nowadays just so he had an excuse to make wedding attire the uniform. Just so you know 15th century wedding dresses suck.

Whenever he makes a new uniform, he makes me try both the "men's" version and the "women's" version, despite the fact that there only two of us who wear clothes and neither of us is normally female. He, of course, has no intention to gender-flip himself since doing so means that you are open to all the pitfalls and pains of womanhood. Like periods.

Gods, those suck.

At this point, the only reason I protest when he gender-flips me to a girl is because I want to avoid those. Running the risk of being kicked in the balls I can deal with. That hurts, but at least it doesn't stick around for a week and cause you to continuously bleed. Plus, there's all the hormonal imbalance you have to watch out for – I snapped at Sokovia once and I felt so horrible afterwards since I actually made him cry. He's super-efficient, but mentally he's the equivalent of a five-year old. That's probably why he hasn't gone through the whole perpetual-teenage-rebellion thing the rest of his species have going on.

Anyway, back to uniforms and spa days. I spend a ridiculous amount of time as a girl because Death is picky about uniforms, even if half of them will only be worn by me. We had a stint where tutus were mandatory for both genders – never again – and don't even get me started on the swimwear phase. That phase ended when he turned me into a girl just to put me into a bikini while I was in the middle of a job in Siberia. I was freezing but at least as a guy I could say that I was wearing a scuba diving suit because you could swim in it. I mean, the flippers were hard to walk in, and the oxygen tank got me some weird looks given what time period it was, but it was full body coverage. There is no such thing as full body coverage when you're wearing a bikini.

Also, wearing next to nothing during the Protestant Reformation was a good way to get yourself condemned by pretty much every single religious organization forming and/or existing. People back then were prudes. I can't even imagine what they'd say if they saw a nude or topless beach nowadays.

Right now, I've lucked out. I've got an anime inspired uniform that lacks tutus, peacock feathers, voodoo tattooed-skull headdresses – don't ask – and it even covers most of my skin in both genders. What's more, Death actually forewent a skirt in the girl version, which, thank the gods, means I don't have to worry about bratty teenage boys trying to flip my miniskirt up. I have some weird fabric strip attached to my belt as a girl that covers enough of my left hip that it probably counts as like the left half of a miniskirt, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

After so long as a girl, I actually don't really mind girl stuff barring periods and makeup. My biggest problem with skirts is that 20-21st century teenage males are perverts and I hate it when they blatantly ogle me. Miniskirts do a commendable job at showing off my legs while still hiding all the important bits. I probably wouldn't have so much trouble if I asked for a skirt that didn't float up in the wind, but I literally kick the Dementors into doing their jobs and I can't do that with a pencil skirt or an ankle length dress.

My current uniform is great though. I have black jeans – leggings in my female form – and dark blue knee length hiking boots. The boots are padded, by the way. I tried chasing a ghost in unpadded hiking boots once, and let me tell you, my blisters had great-grand blisters on them. Death decided to be melodramatic and made all of the straps on my boots – because when your job involves teaching excitable magic puppies to retrieve souls by biting and dragging them, leaving your shoelaces anywhere near their mouths is just a recipe for disaster – light and dark blue checkered patterns with a gold version of the Deathly Hallows symbol over the Velcro part.

Actually, the checkerboard pattern is a recurring thing with this uniform. I don't know what anime inspired it – unlike some people, I actually spend most of my time doing my job and only catch glimpses of anime or TV shows while forcing my boss to go back to work – but the belt has the same light and dark blue checkerboard with gold piping as my shoe straps. I have the gold charm bracelet/indestructible restraints/magic utility belt I got on day one of my job looped around my actual belt. The aforementioned half-miniskirt-half-random-piece-of-fabric thing I have for my female uniform has the checkerboard pattern and gold edging as well.

My top has gold edging on it as well, but unlike most of my outfit, it's black instead of blue. Have you ever seen those double breasted coats? You know, the ones with two parallel columns of buttons on them? My "shirt" is basically one of those, just without the sleeves and shoulders. It's like a tank top without the straps to hold it up. I have to keep it entirely buttoned since the buttons are the only reason it's staying on me. Weird design, I know. It's got a lot of fluff lining it, so it's not abrasive like wearing leather usually is in my experience. That's good, since I'm not wearing anything under it. I mentioned earlier that my current uniform hides most of my skin and the "most of" comes from this shirt. It goes up to my armpits, but lacks anything that extends over my shoulders and onto my arms. My neck and collarbones are exposed to the air.

In case you're wondering, the Deathly Hallows didn't disappear into the ether when I picked all of them up. Death told me that they were, along with my magic charm belt, my primary tools for doing my job. The Resurrection Stone is used as a portable prison for all the ghosts, since I and all the creatures lack the ability to send them anywhere once they've escaped. We can capture them, but that's about it. To get rid of them, I have to put them into the Resurrection Stone and take it back to Death. He removes them from the Resurrection Stone and I go on my merry way while he figures out where they were supposed to go.

Not all ghosts come from getting ditched by Grim puppies. They can also be the result of Dementors not doing their jobs and refusing to fetch the appropriate souls – see the Bloody Baron for an example of this – or, like Moaning Myrtle and Helena Ravenclaw/The Gray Lady, can exist because Fate has plans for them and needs them around for her stupid prophecies to work. Sometimes they're even people the deities were fond of and said deities were throwing up enough of a stink over their deaths that the whole trip-to-the-appropriate-afterlife thing got delayed and the soul in question was turned into a ghost in the meantime.

The Elder Wand has no function other than to be used as a wand, and since I mastered wandless magic literal ages ago, it's mostly a decoration now. About the only time I use it is when I'm making more helpers since it makes focusing those ginormous levels of magic easier. I have it sitting in a fitted cradle that has a small loop at the base of it, so the Elder Wand can be strung onto chain. It looks like a particularly odd pendant.

The Invisibility Cloak can be transfigured into something less noticeable. Usually, Death makes it into part of my uniform, although it isn't normally a cloak. Right now it's my jacket, which I sorely need since my shirt lacks sleeves. It's dark blue on the outside, with gold edging all around it – literally; the edging is on the back hem as well and there's no zipper or buttons. The inside has the same checkerboard pattern as my belt. In the back it splits off into two tails, sort of like a stereotypical stage magician's coat.

The Cloak's hood has been detached and turned into a blue checkerboard newsboys hat – the women's kind, since apparently the hats are made slightly different depending on which gender you are. The hat stays the same regardless of what gender I am at the moment, so I suppose Death has finally managed to get me to wear women's clothing even when I'm a guy – with another gold Deathly Hallows symbol, this one serving as a pin on my hat.

Around the base of the jacket's collar is a gold chain that connects the two sides to "close" it in front of my throat. It looks kind of like the chain on a monocle, except its holding part of my jacket together and the only things strung on it are the Resurrection Stone and the Elder Wand. There are two holes at the part of the jacket where the chain loops through one hole, through the Ring the Resurrection Stone is still mounted on, and through the other hole. Once it gets through the second hole, it loops back around to pass through the little loop on the Elder Wand's cradle, and then connects with the free end of the chain to make a large, if oddly shaped, circle.

I have black gloves with the gold Deathly Hallows symbol stitched on the back of each one, and under my right jacket sleeve, I have a moving, updated list of everything Death needs me to finish. Luckily for me, the tattoo only shows the top ten most urgent tasks, or it would cover my entire body instead of just my right shoulder. My boss, in all of his infinite, sarcastic wisdom, labelled it "List of Things to Do" and puts down "My handsome, incredible, godly boss" whenever he thinks we need more helpers.

Hey, how do you think I knew to warn off perverted thoughts when I was going over how our helpers were made earlier? I have plenty of practice with his sense of humor, and believe me, I've heard all of the innuendo that can be possibly made about this whole situation. Considering how much time travel I do and how long Death's been around, I can safely say that I've heard every piece of innuendo and euphemism from pretty much every time period.

It's not funny anymore.

Anyway, I'm used to the whole making-inappropriate-jokes-about-our-relationship thing. Did you know that some of the less mature Dementors actually try to ask me out? It's ridiculous – it's like a kid asking their own mother out, just with a lot more awkward-teenager-trying-to-be-cool-with-their-crush-and-coming-off-as-really-creepy vibes. It sucks. Now I know how Oedipus's mother felt, and it's a feeling I could have very gladly gone without.

Like I've said multiple times already, Sokovia is the sole exception to everything Dementor-behavior. It's the whole reason I named him.

In this job, we don't really use names. I mean, I call my boss Death just as frequently as I call him boss, and neither of those are really names. Not that deities have human names, but Death is kind of weird in that he wants one. It just changes a lot depending on what anime he's watched recently.

When he – probably illegally, considering that neither of us was a resident of that time period and I had been gender-switched for the ceremony – got us married in the 1400s, he picked Absinthe mostly because he liked the way it sounded. Then he changed my first name to Rowan after he read the definition of Absinthe and decided to make some kind of plant joke that I still don't understand. I think it had something to the fact that both refer to plants, and the fact that rowan berries and the drink-kind of absinthe – not the plant-kind of absinthe, although that may count as well – are both poisonous.

Really, my boss is a jerk.

Right now, he insists on being called Adrien Agreste, because he snuck away to watch Miraculous: Ladybug and Cat Noir and decided to go blond to look like him. He's started cackling every time I ask him why he's decided to suddenly get into cosplay, and I've given it up as something I don't want to understand.

As long as he does his work, I'm happy. On the other hand, if this is some kind of sign that he's planning on turning me into Marinette Dupain-Cheng and taking off to fight crime in spandex, then I swear to every god in existence, I will kill him.

Other than us two, there's exactly three people who actually have names in our little company. There's Sokovia, my darling baby boy Dementor who actually does his work thank the gods. There's Jerry Bandwagon, who's pretty much the head of all the Lethifolds. I was going to name him after Jerry Springer, but he liked the word bandwagon so I made that his surname.

And then there's my familiar. Regulus Halley. Or, as I like to call him, Mr. Bowel-Control-Problems. He's a perpetual Grim puppy, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. He's a Grim puppy with the same blue checkerboard as on my uniform on his collar, and his "nametag" is really just a gold Deathly Hallows symbol.

Death, in case you haven't noticed, is very big on putting his symbol on stuff. Just so long as that stuff isn't being used by psychopathic madmen – *cough* Grindelwald *cough*.

Regulus was named after Regulus Arcturus Black and Halley's Comet. I figured the star theme would work with his first name. I named him after Regulus Black, because just like his namesake, Regulus has somehow managed to defy the natural order of things. All of his littermates have grown up into sensible adults, and yet Regulus remains a puppy. He even still retains all of the ditching-the-good-souls problems and after nineteen centuries he still hasn't been housetrained! I mean, he's very excitable, and when he's excited, he pees. Everywhere. Occasionally he'll even have diarrhea while he pees, and while I know the cause for that – let it be known that gnomes are not appropriate food for Grims of any age and size, though they have yet to figure that out – it still shouldn't be possible!

It's like dealing with Regulus Black's determination to kill himself all over again! He died more than twenty years before he was supposed to and he somehow managed to evade all of Fate's best efforts to keep him alive long enough to fulfill his prophecy. Regulus Black was supposed to live to the age of thirty-three before taking a sabbatical to Africa in order to evade the recently resurrected Nose-less and his supporters. There, Oliver Contraire, a first gen French-American with some of the oddest ideas ever, would come up with the idea to become the Dark Lord Llama, subjugate Africa, and force them to worship llamas.

Kid's a little obsessed with llamas, as you can no doubt tell.

He would make a point of walking through towns he was going to conquer, map out the defenses, and return in his Dark Lord Llama get up to succeed in taking over. He would actually be pretty successful for someone who felt the need to loudly proclaim the "awesomeness that was the godly race of llamas" wherever he went.

While walking through one of his soon to be conquests, he would meet Regulus Black, and become obsessed with making friends with him. Regulus Black would very reluctantly befriend him, simultaneously mocking and despairing over Oliver's determination to earn the epithet he wanted on his gravestone: "Here Lies Oliver the Contrary. He Died as He Lived: With Llamas."

Eventually, at age forty-nine and after almost sixteen years of friendship, one of Oliver's enemies would finally track him down and attempt to assassinate the Dark Lord Llama. Regulus Black would defend and save Oliver at the cost of his own life. Oliver would bury his friend, return to conquering full-time instead of part-time and would finally succeed at subjugating the continent. He would then use every idea he and Regulus came up with for running a country to revolutionize the Magical Empire of African Llamas.

Regulus Black's death date would be named a national holiday, the only one devoid of llamas in the history of the Empire, and – in honor of him – Oliver would start every reform on this day after a nationwide breakfast of fruit parfaits, which had been Regulus Black's favorite dessert and therefore was not something that should be served for breakfast.

The Magical Empire of African Llamas would be the first magical government in the world to have nationwide health care, institute Unbreakable Oaths to be honest, fair, and just for anyone and everyone with a job, and to adopt a magical version of the mundane schooling system. They would be the first nation with magical preschool, kindergarten, and universities, and would alert parents of first generations immediately after the first incident of accidental magic occurred. They would be the first with total equality for all races and the first to completely abandon the concept of blood-purity.

Oliver would die unmarried and childless almost twenty years to the day after Regulus Black died, and his successor would bury him next to his old friend. Oliver's epithet would read, "Here Lies Oliver the Contrary, the Dark Lord Llama, and the Greatest Revolutionary of His Time. Here He Lies with His Friend, Confidante, and Inspiration for All of Eternity."

Oliver's successor and every one after would take office on the anniversary of Oliver's death, and each succeeding Emperor would keep up the tradition of executing reforms on the anniversary of Regulus Black's death. The Magical Empire of African Llamas would be the only magical community to survive the reveal of magic to the mundane world ninety percent intact, and would replace the International Confederation of Wizards as the representative of all magical communities. They would be the longest lasting magical empire in history.

Of course, since Regulus Black went and offed himself before he even reached twenty, who knows what's going to happen? Death's forbidden me from travelling to that portion of history, so all I know is the prophecy and what was supposed to happen, but I don't know anything past when Oliver Contraire first decided to immigrate to Africa. I've been informed I can start going there as soon as the timeline starts settling down.

Speaking of being informed of something by my illustrious, oh-so-perverted boss – please note my sarcasm; it's the most important thing in that sentence – my tattoo has just informed me that I have a date with Survival.

I don't mind him. He's a nice guy, unlike his brother Death. And he pities me and commiserates over Death's absolute lack of Competency. Well. Mostly, I just rant at him and he stands there looking awkward and terrified of me. But he can still sympathize to an extent, so we're cool.

I just don't see him a lot. He has his own Favorite that he fawns over – that poor, unfortunate soul – and what with my travelling and his more-or-less stationary existence as his Favorite's self-appointed best friend and rabid protector, our schedules don't line up that much.

It'll be nice to be able to stop and have a chat with him – before I relay boss's request for a scheduled execution. I hate those. We have an overabundance of work as it is, and then all the sudden Death decides to overwhelm us by having his brother cause a famine or an epidemic, and the next thing we know we're swamped by unchecked souls needing to go to the afterlife.

Ughhhh….

And there go my hopes for a spa day.

M-C 6: Of Horrible, Bearded, Old Men with Too Much Time on Their Hands, Families of Blood that Have Broken and Others that Refuse To Break, and the World's Most Dangerous Cuckoos (Varying Identifying Soul Marks AU, Major Crossovers with Norse Mythology and Avengers)

Thor knows nothing of his family history. Oh, sure, when he stepped foot on Midgard a thousand years ago, he told great tales of valor and the works of his father. But of the two, it was Loki who told the Midgardians about their family tree.

It was Loki who explained Ragnarök.

It was Loki who watched his family break to pieces while Thor remained oblivious. It was Loki who tried to pick up the pieces and cut his hands till they bled on the shards. It was Loki who suffered for trying to rebuild something he loved. It was Loki who was punished by being forced to watch everything he loved be broken apart and scattered like ashes in the wind.

It was Loki who loved us first.

Let me introduce myself. I am the – supposed – younger brother to Heiress Rose Mary Potter and the Boy-Who-Lived Jameson "Jason" Canis Potter. I appear to be the son of the Lord James Charlus Potter and the Lady Lily Anne Potter nee Evans. I am known to the rest of the world as Harry Jordan Potter.

I have never voluntarily gone by that foolish, mortal name.

My preferred name, as I tell anyone who will listen, is Jordan Lockeson-McConaway.

I am the younger brother of Seth McConaway, a veterinary medicine college student. I am the older brother of the twins Marvin and Oliver Lockeson-Vein. I am the older brother to Helena Graves and Frederick Lockeson-Wolfe.

Have you ever heard of the cuckoo in the nest? The mother cuckoo places the cuckoo egg in another bird's nest and the other birds raise it as their own until the egg hatches. The newly hatched cuckoo then kills them. Or something like that, it may just be my personal feelings bleeding through.

I am the cuckoo in the nest.

Odin Child-Thief, Mother-Killer, Infant-Torturer, Family-Breaker, took my siblings and I from our father and separated us. To us, he committed atrocities, then turned and claimed that he was the hero and we the monsters.

Our father stole us back and stole us away.

"Hide," he told us. "Hide and grow strong in secret. I will be fine only if you are fine. And remember always, remember that I love you more than anything in the world. Now, go, run and hide and be fine so that I may be as well."

We ran and hid, and Odin grew arrogant, safe in his knowledge that he was superior to all, to our father.

What a fool. As if he could ever be better than Father.

Father, who is the god of Chaos, whom only a god of Order could match, and Odin is not that Order.

No Asgardian would ever lower themselves to the level of a Midgardian, so in order to hide, we made ourselves Midgardians.

Thor, fool that he was, never noticed Father's growing rage. Thor never questioned the Child-Thief. Thor never noticed our absence, or indeed, our very existence.

Thor got himself exiled from Asgard and fell in love with the Midgardians. Well, with one in particular, but that is not particularly important. All that matters is that that was the end of our peaceful days.

When Loki – Father, kind, loving Father who never abandoned us regardless of how it would have been easier, safer, for him to do so – was returned to Asgard to await punishment for something he did not do under his own power, under his own will, he was subjected to the punishment that long ago seer had predicted for him.

Oh, it was not the way or the time she had predicted – she was human, fallible, and this would come to pass so far into her future that she could not see clearly – but it was awful all the same.

Father was not bound by Narvi's intestines, for Narvi was not yet slain, but by equally inescapable ropes. The poisonous serpent which dripped acidic venom from its fangs was there to torture him but it was not hanging over the rock he was tied to. No, it hung over a branch of the World Tree Yggdrasil and Sigyn, Father's ex-wife and the mother of the twins Narvi and Vali, was there in Father's torment. She was not, as the seer predicted, there to catch the venom in a bowl so that it would not harm him, but instead there to catch the venom from the serpent and return to pour it slowly over Father.

She never had loved Father.

Thor had loved her once, although lusted over would have been a better term for all that he claimed otherwise. Odin had demanded that she marry one of his sons – hah! As though Father was ever one of his children; oh Father knew that early on, far earlier than anyone had ever expected – and between loud and grabby Thor and quiet, gentlemanly Father, she chose Father. She knew, as did everyone, that Odin's choice was only a farce for the sake of political relations with her people, the Vanir, and that she was really meant to choose Thor.

She had no choice in her marriage, but she chose not to learn to love Father, who did not love her either on their marriage day but chose to learn anyway. Father tried so hard to love a woman who resented him, in a castle where Thor resented him for his bride, in a realm where everyone resented him for taking away their golden prince's princess. Father tried so hard and it nearly broke him.

All that saved him were the births of Narvi and Vali. All that saved him was Hel's birth.

Father had not wanted to marry Sigyn anymore than she wanted to marry into the House of Borr. I would call it the House of Odin, but by marrying Father, she did not marry into the House of Odin.

Father had wanted to marry Angrboda, the gygr – a female jotun – who had taught him his magic. Father had loved her oh so very much. She was my mother, Hel's mother, and Fenrisulfr's mother.

Sleipnir had been born long before me. My older brother had been taken by Odin Child-Thief shortly after his birth, and Father wisely sought to hide his relations and children with a gygr from the so-called AllFather.

Odin Child-Thief is no father of mine.

Shortly after my birth, Thor met Sigyn and this whole charade of marriage began. Many years later, when I neared the age Sleipnir had been when I was born; Sigyn at last birthed Narvi and labored through those last few hours into the next day to bring Vali into the world. She cursed Father every moment for it. In contrast, only a few years later, before Narvi and Vali had even learned to hold their heads up on their own, Angrboda bore Hel.

She did not curse Father for the birth, but I understand that it was not the way of the Jotnar to nurture their young. It was why she did not interact with me often as a child.

Father attempted to split his time between all of us, with Sleipnir and Sigyn and the twins in Asgard, and Angrboda and Hel and me, in Jotunheim. It worked for only a while, and then Sigyn Kin-Traitor followed Father to Jotunheim. She saw Hel and I come running to Father's side and call him Father. She saw Angrboda in the doorway, heavily pregnant with Fenrisulfr. She turned and left.

Sigyn returned to Asgard and reported that Father had created Aesir-Jotnar monsters. She asked for a favor in return for the knowledge that Father had "betrayed" Asgard: the dissolution of her marriage. Odin granted it to her, both knowing that by then Thor's interest in her had waned and she would return to Vanaheim.

By the time the Asgardian forces arrived at my childhood home, Angrboda had birthed Fenrisulfr. Odin slew her and took my littlest brother, only a few hours old, and my sister and I to Asgard in chains.

When we had arrived at his castle fortress, he ordered Narvi and Vali brought to the throne room. They were confused and frightened. Father was begging and crying for Odin to show mercy to us, and Sigyn had come home only long enough to grab her essentials before departing for Vanaheim without her children. No one came to comfort them.

Odin made a spectacle of us. He mocked Father for birthing Sleipnir, an eight-legged horse, never mind that it was his own cruel punishment to Father that resulted in Sleipnir's conception and birth. He forced me into the form of snake and cursed me to encircle all of Midgard. Then he cast me from Asgard and turned to my siblings, trusting that his curse would immediately lead me to Midgard's oceans without him opening the Bifrost specifically.

I did not. I was carried to Midgard the hard way, by falling through the branches of Yggdrasil, never stopping on any of them long enough to rest. It was a long fall from each branch, and by the time Father had rescued me I had yet to even see Midgard. The transformation he could aid me with; he turned it into a voluntary transformation, painless and swift and natural. The curse he could do nothing for as it was tied to Odin's spear, Gungnir, and he would need to steal that in order to reverse the curse.

Odin would stop him long before his hands would ever touch Gungnir.

The curse tortured me, punished me, for every second I spent away from Midgard. I had clung to him and cried, even as Hel grabbed his hair, and the twins nearly pushed Fenrisulfr away as they tried to latch on tighter. We were all a sorry mess. Sleipnir had so much patience, carrying Father between the gaps in the branches with swift jumps, never stopping even as we made a most awful racket upon his back.

I was not there for my siblings' sentencing, but I learned of them later, when Sleipnir had taken an Asgardian form and Father had left to divert the Infant-Torturer's attention.

Sleipnir – whom I had never met but had heard so much about before that disaster of a day – had been punished long before my birth by being bridled and saddled, forced to carry the Child-Thief wherever that monster pleased. Thankfully, the monster had no need to travel anywhere, content to sit upon his golden throne and survey all in his kingdom, so secure in his knowledge that the other races were too frightened of his immeasurable cruelty to ever think that someone would ever dare disobey him.

I suppose he thought that Father would not be disobeying his rule a second time, and to be fair, the Aesir were too unthinkingly loyal to him to ever think to be disobedient. No other race would defy him; they had learned from the example he had set with the subjugation of the Jotnar.

All this meant that, with no reason to search out insurgents, and all the comforts of home in his gilded city, the Child-Thief had no reason to take a stroll down to the stable to see Sleipnir. An illusion, one of Father's favorite tricks, ensured that the stable master and all visitors saw "Sleipnir" sitting in his stall, content as any mindless beast to be pampered and spoiled. The only way for someone to notice Father's trickery was for someone to attempt to board Sleipnir, but of course, no one would dare ride the Child-Thief's favored steed.

My elder brother's absence went unnoticed.

After I had been cast away, the monster had banished Hel to Helheim. He made her Queen of the Dead, and all the more fool he was for it. "Lady Hel," he had proclaimed, "you will never be able to leave Helheim. You will reign over the dishonored dead, over all those who failed to die with glory on the battlefield."

"Lady," he called her. It was Asgardian custom to never call another queen "Queen" because as far as they were concerned there was only one queen, Queen Frigga, the AllMother. Any woman who would earn the title queen would instead be called "Lady." But he did not understand. Hel was not of Asgard. She was of Jotunheim, and was to be the queen of Helheim. She had no reason to obey Asgardian custom, and so she was—is Queen Hel.

The fool never realized that he had made her watch her family be ripped apart and then had given her an army to wage war with. An army, most notably, which could not be killed and who would be very happy to aid their new child-queen in her eventual revenge against the Child-Thief. He belonged to her realm after all, and it was about time he entered Helheim for good.

No man who tortured children as he did would go to Valhalla, the home of the honorable dead. We would lie, cheat, and steal – would poison him at his table; stab him in his bed – to make sure he never reached that gilded realm where he was worshipped. No, he would spend his afterlife as my sister's slave; we would be certain of that.

Besides that obvious lapse in planning, the monster had only specified that Hel could not travel on the Bifrost while leaving. He forgot that there were more ways than that to travel between the realms. If nothing else, one could do as I had done: fall from one branch of Yggdrasil onto another, slide into, through and out of the realm on that branch, off the branch entirely, and rinse and repeat. It wasn't fun by any means, and it took forever and a day, and a couple thousand bruises, but it would eventually lead one to their destination.

Father took Hel through one of these passageways while he found me. Sleipnir carried her and the twins and Fenrisulfr while Father cast a tracking spell on me. Hel had arrived directly at Helheim via the Bifrost – a mocking gesture of good will from one realm's ruler to another – but Father knew that I would not have arrived at my destination as swiftly.

The twins and Fenrisulfr had been assigned a "special" punishment. It was the Infant-Torturer's belated retaliation for Sigyn refusing to marry Thor, directed at the blameless.

It was pointlessly cruel and cruelly pointless. Sigyn had already left; had already abandoned her toddler children to their fates. She cared not for what would happen to them, the witch.

"Kin-Traitor" I call her, and with good reason.

Odin Infant-Torturer turned the twins into ravening wolves and Fenrisulfr into a helpless pup. He intended for Narvi and Vali to fight each other to the death for the pleasure of devouring their newborn half-sibling. One of the twins would win their involuntary fight and consume not only their full-blooded sibling's corpse, but the still-living bundle of fur that was my newborn brother.

Then a commotion in the halls outside reached the throne room.

It was perhaps the only time Thor's obliviousness helped me and mine. He and the Warriors Three had been out hunting during all of this, and they returned with great cheer and enough food for a week-long feast.

Starving and delighted by their golden prince's return, the sick and twisted Asgardians left the spectacle of fur and muscle that my remaining brothers had become. Odin, deciding that they no longer needed to exist, but that the twins would finish each other and Fenrisulfr off on their own if he removed them from the castle, teleported them outside and left to congratulate his only son.

Father ran from the room as well, but not to congratulate Thor on his catch. He hurried to Sleipnir, and after explaining what had occurred to my elder brother, climbed aboard his back and left in pursuit of my younger brothers.

Hel and I, he had heard our destination and knew how to find us. But it was Narvi and Vali and Fenrisulfr whom had been dismissed without a word. It was them he needed to find immediately.

As it turned out, the Child-Thief had greatly underestimated the instincts of a wolf. The twins, while not in possession of their higher mental faculties, were able to identify their littermates by scent and had not attacked either each other or Fenrisulfr. Father and Sleipnir found them a few miles from the castle grooming their newfound sibling while Fenrisulfr squirmed on the ground and begged for food.

After returning them to Asgardian form, Father went about collecting Hel while he waited for the tracking spell's results to become clear. Once he caught me in my fall, he took us to Midgard and told us to run and hide.

Sleipnir, once he adapted to walking with a quarter of the legs he was used to, took up horse-care for work. The Northern Midgardians needed their horses and livestock cared for, and while he was not familiar with what other animals required in terms of healing, he knew enough magic from his and Father's secret lessons to be able to put together a solution.

Sleipnir appeared to be his early twenties – what with how long our lifespans are, we age at different rates than Midgardians do, so he appeared to be nearly a decade older than I. As the oldest, it was easiest for him to find work and care for the rest of us.

Of course, this was all ancient history.

Father told us to run and hide all those centuries ago, and we hid by becoming Midgardians. When they started to notice that we were too young for how old we were supposed to be, we erased their memories and left.

We would move on to another family and start over, and when they noticed that we weren't aging correctly, we would erase their memories. Rinse and repeat.

As I mentioned earlier, I am currently known as Harry Jordan Potter, but I prefer the name Jordan Lockeson-McConaway. After so many years, we learned that in order to fully assimilate into new families, we would often need to spread ourselves out into several families.

Very few families these days have six children, the Weasleys notwithstanding.

Sleipnir is now the grandson of Professor McGonagall's squib brother; the son of her squib niece. It's where he got the name McConaway, although he has taken to naming himself Seth in modern times. It suits him, though not as much as his true name.

He most frequently pretends to also be a squib, and has been very careful to not perform any magic around his new family. Professor McGonagall, for all that she is known at school to have eagle eyes when it comes to troublemakers and liars, has never caught onto the cuckoo in her niece's nest.

We are, after all, the children of Loki Liesmith, the Trickster God. Very few can catch us in our lies.

I am, of course, the cuckoo in the Potter's nest. A very dangerous cuckoo, considering the fact that I went down in Norse Mythology – hah! So that's what they are calling those screwed up versions of my family history nowadays! – as Jormungandr, the longest, largest, most venomous serpent in existence. I have to be, of course. You don't get to kill an Asgardian with nothing but poison if you're not the most poisonous thing out there.

Besides, the only thing that could possibly match me in terms of venom is a Basilisk, but those were one of my pet projects a few centuries back, and they failed to be as venomous as I wanted them to be.

They were still better than Fenris' werewolves though. Sleipnir said so.

And anyway, Jormungandr is my real name; I only go by Jordan because it's spelled similar to Jormungandr and I have to go by a modern name.

Narvi and Vali were adopted into the Matheson family, but of course they were never going to go by that surname.

In Asgardian culture, your surname indicates whose child you are, or what titles you've earned for yourself. Narvi, Vali, Fenris, and I are all sons of Loki, so we would be called Lokison. Or Lockeson, as Locke was another way some of the old Northern Midgardians pronounced Father's name back when we first arrived on Midgard. Father is technically Sleipnir's mother, even though he calls Father "Father" like the rest of us do.

However, since Sleipnir's father isn't technically Father, Sleipnir's last name should actually be Svadilfarison. Similarly, since the surname picks the name of the parent the same gender as the child, Hel's surname isn't Lokadottir like she prefers it to be, but Angrbodadottir.

Of course, that doesn't stop all of us going by Lokison/Lokadottir. We are, after all, far more Loki's children than we ever were our other parents'.

Now, though, even as I walk through the halls of the Academy on Hill's Waters – not Hogwarts, never Hogwarts, not after all of the effort we put into its construction – I seethe. Father cannot come home now, cannot come and visit us, because his witch of an ex-wife will stop him, will raise the alarm, will tell the Legacy-Eraser that Father has escaped.

How. Dare. She.

A hand touches my arm, and it is only the familiar taste of Hel's magic that stops me from lashing out.

I look down, and see my sister's hand gripping my sleeve. At her side, Fenris cowers. The sight softens my heart. They are just as worried as I am.

I pull them over to a side passage, absently weaving a spell to hide us, and heft Fenris up onto my hip. Hel crowds against my side and I hug her with my free arm.

They are both so light and scrawny. I frown, mentally reminding myself to feed them later. Seth is not here, busy with his school and watching over Narvi and Vali. Making sure that these two are fed is my duty. I glance down at the floor and consider the basilisk corpse in the dungeons. It will…do for a meal or two. Unfortunately, with our appetites, it won't last much longer. I will need to bribe the house elves for more food. Much more food.

Ginny passes by, giggling and gossiping about which boy likes which girl. Rose, Parvati and Lavender are there too, sharing stories and rumors, while Padma and Hermione chat about a project of theirs in the perfumed wake of their friends.

I sneer at them. Jason and Rose have this plan for us three and their friends. According to it, Rose will marry some older, handsome Weasley child – "Only the best looking one, I want mom's red hair to survive in future generations, but I won't marry an ugly man!" – while I have been involuntarily volunteered to marry Ginny, who is irritating and noisy and frankly completely unappealing. Jason will marry Lavender and have beautiful kids who excel at beating Dark Lords and Slytherins alike – not that he sees a difference between the two.

It figures that Rose would want pretty kids to dress up like dolls and Jason's goal is to raise little psychopaths that enjoy mauling people based on the results of a personality quiz they took as eleven year olds.

Hermione and Ron would, according to this plan, get married and have a bajillion kids. Parvati and Padma would marry some other Weasley males, probably the twin terrors, given Rose's lack of interest in "people who are like dad and Uncle Siri."

Funny how she seems to think that I would.

With this plan, we would all be related, which is apparently an appealing fate.

I find it disgusting. My urge to kill my so-called family increases with every look at my "siblings".

Real siblings don't dictate who their sibling can and cannot interact with. Real siblings don't tell each other who to marry. Real siblings don't try to draw up immature yet binding marriage contracts in order to force their siblings into unwanted relationships with people they love but the aforementioned sibling hates.

They're just like the Legacy-Eraser, only inexperienced and far weaker.

Thank the Norns that they do not have my true name, or the magical power to force a contract on me. I would hate to have to waste my energy killing that waste-of-space Weasley. Then I wouldn't be able enjoy all the prank items her brothers came up with. What a shame that'd be.

The inexperienced fools don't even have the decency to attempt to set up a contract between me and my soulmate. It would be pointless, of course, since Sleipnir and I have both been long aware of our connection and completely uninterested in any sort of romantic relationship with anyone, never mind each other, but still the point stands.

…Sleipnir has pointed out that I must be fair and take into account their youth and consequential foolishness. Humans do not have soul marks like ours. They only have a phrase that describes their soulmate in such very vague terms that a hundred people or more may fit the criteria.

The Aesir gods have a timer counting on their forearm. It will only stop once they meet their perfect other half. The Vanir gods, like their sister race, have a timer on their arms that counts the seconds until they meet their match. The difference is that the Aesir will forever have the time that passed between their birth and the day they met their soulmate branded on them, while the Vanir have the time until they meet their soulmate branded on their arms at birth. The moment the Vanir meet their soulmate will be the moment the timer hits zero, whereas the Aesir timers start at zero at birth. It's essentially the difference between counting up to the moment they meet versus counting down to the moment they meet.

We, of course, have neither. We are Jotnar, not Aesir nor Vanir. Our wrists bear the name of our other half in their hand-writing, in their native language.

I have known from the day I was born that Sleipnir was mine, just as Father understood that we two were platonic soulmates from the moment Sleipnir first took Midgardian form, and his Soul's Name – my name – became legible. The twins are similarly matched, as most non-Midgardian twins are.

I'm sure that many people would draw the wrong conclusions based on who we are matched to. It's ridiculous. Have these people never heard of asexual relationships? The closest Sleipnir ad I have ever come to having or creating children was when we raised our new-born brother and toddler siblings. When I share his bed, it is either because I am not afraid to admit that I am a child and am in need of comfort, or we don't have enough beds and I don't want to make our siblings sleep on the floor, or sleep there myself. There is nothing romantic about our relationship.

Anyway, Hel and Fenris are matched to Midgardian people. Fenris' soulmate is currently an eighty-year old man dying of heart failure. In a few years' time, Fenris will have a new name upon his wrist. Hel's soulmate is… actually one of my dorm mates. I don't like him, but I don't like most people, so Sleipnir says we're ignoring my opinion. He is admittedly a nice person – very kind to Hel, which is always nice considering that it's not guaranteed – but Midgardians, especially the teenagers, think that soulmates are just for having sex with. Justin Finch-Fletchley will touch my baby sister over my dead body. Or when he's old enough to realize that Hel is way too young for certain adult activities. Whichever comes first. If he reacts badly to this news…well, in a few decades' time, he'll be dead and Hel will have a new incarnation of her soulmate to spend time with.

It won't even be hard to find them. What with modern Midgardian technology, we can simply Google the name of whoever it is that's on my siblings' wrists. A quick check of their soul marks would assure us it would be them. Centuries of experience tells us that Hel's soulmate will always have "Queen of the Dishonored" written on them, while Fenris' soulmate will simply read "Godwolf".

In my arms, Fenris shifts, and Hel sniffles a little before quieting herself. I breathe out a sigh, before crouching to lift my sister up. Thank the Norns for Asgardian strength. I wouldn't be able to lift my physically twelve year old sister otherwise. For that matter, I wouldn't be able to lift Fenris up, who is still the equivalent of an eight year old in developmental terms, but is currently disguised as a particularly short eleven year old.

I twist the magic around us, nudging at hiding spells and sound-canceling charms until they fit right, then head off to my dormitory. Unlike the prejudiced Gryffindors, the Hufflepuffs will welcome me and my siblings.

It had taken three years of uncertainty and unstated fear, but as soon as Hel ran up to me the day after her Sorting and asked if she could sit with me for breakfast and I pulled her into my lap instead, my housemates relaxed around me. Apparently I gave off a murderous aura on a good day – unsurprising given my temperament; Father and Sleipnir had always despaired of me for it – but seeing me cater to the whims of a tiny first year was enough to convince them I belonged.

Justin remarked afterwards that he'd always wondered what had gotten me sent into Hufflepuff. I wasn't friendly – was more inclined to snap like a Gryffindor when talking to a Slytherin, and I had in fact scared first years to tears before – and I certainly didn't try hard in class or at anything – also true; magic was far more instinctive to me than anyone realized it was, so there was no reason to try working at something I'd mastered even before the twins were born – and if I had any House loyalty, no one had ever seen or heard of it before. That was despite the start-of-the-year lectures about how your House was your new family, and several pointed looks from the prefects and even Professor Sprout at the end of last year's lecture.

I openly scoffed at that. My family was my family; when the other Hufflepuffs had a lifespan measured in millennia and a prophecy foretelling the murder of their cousins and uncle and relished the idea of it, then and only then would I consider thinking of them as family.

Justin hadn't known the reason behind my scoffing, but he remarked that everyone felt a little more at ease, knowing that I was in Hufflepuff for familial loyalty.

They had been happy to welcome Hel into Hufflepuff despite her being Sorted into Slytherin. The older snakes disapproved of her "slumming it with the duffers and the Boy-Who-Lived's brother" but one offer from me to eat them had her giggling and ignoring them.

I still paid them a visit in their own common room to remind them not to do anything to her. She's my baby sister and they had better treat her like the Queen she really is or we would be having problems – or rather, they would and I would be enjoying their pleas for mercy.

The snake decorations still periodically hiss at them and croon over Hel in such a manner that even the dumb ones like Crabbe and Goyle can tell that they're fussing. It's always amusing when that happens, because the next day the entire House is jumpy and giving me terrified looks. I've even caught some of the snakes offering my baby sister and her Hufflepuff friends private lessons in order to help with anything they're having trouble with.

When Fenris came to school the next year, and he failed to even go to his House table at the Sorting, instead scurrying over to me, the Hufflepuffs closed ranks around him. McGonagall could scowl at him all she liked – actually no, she couldn't, I would have to teach her a lesson if she ever did again – and the Gryffindors could whine, but the moment someone started booing him for going to the safest person he knew in an unfamiliar environment, they lost the right to have him stay with them.

Fenris still stays in the Hufflepuff dormitory more than he does in the Gryffindor one. We have recruited the house elves in keeping his stuff over here, although periodically the Gryffindor Prefects – stupid Hermione and useless Ron – will attempt to force him to come back to his House.

McGonagall has already resigned herself to the fact that there is a lion in the badgers' den, but since she didn't protest when Snape complained that Hel was spending more time in our dormitory than in the Slytherin one last year, she can't now. Sprout won Hel that time and now she's won Fenris.

Of course, the only recurring staff protester is the Toad, but I don't need to worry about the opinions of a lesser amphibian. Her attempts at carving words into my hand – or forcing me to do it, same difference – with dark magic don't work when I can turn my skin into skin-colored scales harder than diamond at will.

Of course, the moment she tries it on Hel and Fenris, she's dead. I'm not hungry – like all snakes, I can spend ages digesting the same meal before I have to eat again; it just takes a while longer in my case, stretching days into years – but I will make an exception for her. They can't try to send me to Azkaban if there's no evidence that I had nothing to do with her disappearance, and I am very good at cornering people where no one can see them and swallowing them whole.

It helps that my snake form is large enough to swallow a good portion of the school itself by now. I am not that tiny snakeling that could be tossed over one's shoulder and forgotten anymore. I may have taken the intervening years to hide, but I have also taken them to grow. When the time comes, I will swallow Thor before he has a chance to lift Mjolnir.

I slip through the entrance to the Hufflepuff dormitory, and immediately head to my room. Nobody notices us – I have been practicing magical concealment for longer than this school has existed after all – and as soon as I set them down on my bed, Fenris turns into a wolf again.

He's always been fonder of his animal form than the twins.

Hel crawls over to snuggle into my lap, just the way she always did with Father whenever he could visit, and starts hiccupping. Fenris makes an anxious snuffling sound and curls himself into a circle at my side, chewing on his tail. I pull it out of his mouth and summon his favorite carrot plush toy so he can chew on that. Father had reinforced it to withstand Fenris' jaws.

Then I shift, flowing around them and making sure to shrink myself into a smaller form that will actually fit on the bed instead of drooping off of it. I know from experience that when I'm in a cold-blooded form, nothing is more irritating than having to constantly readjust my internal temperature because the stone floor keeps sucking out the heat.

I may be three-quarters Jotunn but when I'm in a room that's shared with mortal beings, I need to keep the temperature at a level where they won't freeze to death. If I touch the heat-sucking stone while a snake, then eventually it will leech out all of my body heat and my internal body temperature will return to Jotunn body temperatures. Jotunn body temperatures are so cold that they freeze everything around them…including my roommates.

Father is – despite what the Child-Thief and Child-Deceiver tell him and his cousin – the son of the Jotunn King Laufey and the Aesir princess Eostre Bestladottir. Eostre died a few years after giving birth to Father, and her husband Laufey married the gygr Farbauti and sired Helblindi and Byleistr.

When Odin Borrson discovered, many years later, that his sister had died, he used her death as a reason to wage war with the Jotnar. During this Aesir-Jotnar war, he killed Father's stepmother, kidnapped his toddler nephew, and stole the Casket of Ancient Winters.

He left behind orders for the Aesir army to decimate as much of the Jotnar forces as they could and spent the rest of Father's childhood telling Father that he was his son, rather than his nephew. Even Frigga Child-Deceiver went along with this lie; as though youth had made Father any less able to tell a lie apart from a truth.

Even if he couldn't, Father was far too old to forget his stepmother's murder at the hands of his uncle, who dared to call himself Father's father.

Anyway, since I am three-quarters Jotunn, I must concentrate when I keep things at a normal temperature in my dorm room. While Hel is used to this, Fenris – who is young and has never been separated from Sleipnir's side for so long before – is still getting used to the uncomfortably-warm temperatures mortals like so much. He will likely try to lower the room temperature again.

We have already heard several puzzled complaints from his dorm mates about how cold the room is – Jotnar like to sleep in the cold and being of the line that has spent so much time near the Casket of Ancient Winters that we have begun to develop its ability to create blizzards simply by breathing, we are more capable than any other Jotunn of lowering the temperature to subzero levels.

Fenris is not happy that he has to suffer the warmth to be with his friends.

Feet thump lightly against stones outside of our room. I scowl, lifting my head briefly and tasting the approaching group's magic to determine who is arriving. It's my dorm mates. I absently conjure a plaque over the door saying that my siblings are in and sleeping, but I don't expect them to avoid the room after seeing it.

Irritated, I shift back, before nudging Hel and Fenris, cajoling them into returning to Midgardian form. Fenris slips back obediently, clutching his carrot toy and snuffling into my side like he's trying to use my shirt as a tissue without me noticing. Hel peers at me, frowning, but she's heard what I have and the black rot from the Family-Breaker's curse recedes a little.

It won't vanish entirely – the rot will stay so long as she is Queen of the Dishonored Dead – but she can move somewhere it won't be seen. Like under her clothes and nowhere near her face.

My dorm mates' voices quiet as they notice the plaque on the door, and after a moment, they slowly slip inside. The door creaks regardless of their care to be silent, but Fenris and Hel have already drifted off – or are pretending to. I hush them anyway.

Justin mouths an apology as the others slide over to their beds and exchange their textbooks. Our free period will be over soon, and they need their books for DADA. Honestly, I should be doing that too, but I haven't showed up for class since that first lesson with the Toad, and my siblings need me more now than the Toad needs me in her classroom.

Not that the Toad needs me in her classroom. At this point, I'm seriously considering the idea that the Toad wants to die. If so, I'd be more than happy to oblige.

Three hours later, Sleipnir stops me. We are shadow-speaking, while Hel and Fenris gorge themselves on the basilisk. I scowl at what should be my shadow, but is currently serving as a mirror through which my brother and I can talk. Sleipnir huffs back at me.

"Jor. You can't. I'm preemptively forbidding this." Sleipnir says firmly. "I want that Toad dead as much as you do, but eating her isn't the answer. You've eaten too much in recent times anyway."

"Then what do you suggest I do?!" I snarl back. The Toad has crossed a line today. After returning from DADA, Justin told me that the Toad had finally had enough of my "insolence". Rather than assigning me detention, however, she had assigned Hel and Fenris my detention.

At least Justin was appropriately outraged by the threat to my siblings. Perhaps there is hope for him as an acceptable soulmate for my sister, after all.

Sleipnir frowns to himself, considering the Problem of the Toad. Then he brightens up. "We already know that the other teachers aren't going to do anything – honestly, it's like adults in the British Wizarding World in general contract a sudden inability to do anything useful once they hit the age of twenty – but…the Weasley twins like to play pranks, don't they?" His smile isn't so much a smile as it is a feral showing of teeth. I approve of the implicit promise of violence.

"We're the Lockesons, the children of the Trickster God. I'm sure you can…devise a few harmless pranks with coincidentally damaging outcomes for the Toad. Perhaps an itching powder in the staff's morning drinks, punishment for not interceding, with the Toad's drink being transfigured into hot sauce while she holds the cup it's in? If it seems benign, and no one can detect it, they may just blame the twins for it."

I pause to consider it. The staff would be punished for failing our siblings; the Toad would be utterly humiliated when she alone found hot sauce in her cup. "The itching powder is juvenile enough that even the Weasley twins can do it, but the hot sauce is a different thing…I could try anchoring a spell to her hand and the cup." I mused, working it out in my head. "Like two jigsaw pieces, the spells anchored to each item would be essentially useless on their own, but when in contact, they would form a different whole – in this case, the transfiguration of the Toad's drink."

I frown and start pacing. All of us, as Father's children, have a mischievous streak as long as Yggdrasil is tall. The appeal of rightful vengeance in the shape of not-quite-benign pranks is too great to ignore, but Father taught us better than to be caught at our work. "If she showed the cup to the other staff, though, they would be able to see it. Hmm….what if I anchor an illusion on the cup? One that makes it so that only whatever is attached to the other half of the jigsaw transfiguration spell can see through the illusion. That way the Toad would know what she is drinking, but no one else could tell…" I trail off, still working the idea over in my brain.

Hel and Fenris wander over to me, looking curious. "What are you two talking about, Eldest Brother and Older Brother?" Hel wonders as Fenris grabs onto my shirt sleeve.

Sleipnir smiles at them both as Fenris peers down at him and waves hello. "The Toad wants you two to report to her torture chamber – sorry, "office" – for her messed-up idea of detention. Jor and I obviously aren't going to let her do that, so you two won't be going anywhere. By the way, if she tries to drag you anywhere, you have my permission to kick and bite her, and run back to the Snake Chamber."

He chuckles when both of our siblings perk up at this news – Hel's sense of smell might not be as sharp as Fenris' or mine, but even she can smell the repulsively overpowering perfume the Toad prefers. That scent sticks around for hours unless we use our magic on it. I have a ward set up around the Hufflepuff dining table and Common Room entrance just to ward it off.

"Anyway, Jor and I were figuring out how to get back at her for trying to assign you two detentions." Sleipnir explained.

"Can we help?" Hel asked curiously. "I have some ideas! One of my friends said she heard that the inside of her office is covered in animated cat plates and some of them are supposedly vintage! We could charm all of the cats to pee on her and to do all sorts of awful stuff to her!"

Fenris beamed as he started climbing me. "I have my special wolves!" He offered excitedly. "I can tell them to follow and scare her!"

Sleipnir and I share a smile at that. Chances are, Hati and Sköll will do a lot more to her than scare her. Fenris' playmates melt into the shadows – literally – when hiding, but they are large enough to rival a full-grown Clydesdale stallion. The lesser amphibian would probably have a heart attack if Hati and Sköll Star-Eater follow her around. The sight of their eyes alone, shining ominously out of unnaturally pitch-dark shadows, has frightened animals to death before.

I have no doubt that the Toad would be the same.

"We had a better idea." I told my siblings, and notice absently that Narvi and Vali have attached themselves to Sleipnir's sides. "We are going to figure out how to make the Toad drink only hot sauce. We're just working out the kinks in the plan."

"Older Brother, we want to help!" The twins immediately chorused. Fenris and Hel nodded their agreement.

"Bigger Brothers are right, Little Brother and I want to do something to help prank the evil lady!" Hel enthused. "we could be a distraction so that nobody notices the prank!"

Sleipnir stifled a chuckle. "That's a great idea, Hela, but we don't want it to be immediately obvious that something's up." He explained. "However, if you could find a way to make it look like the Weasley Twins are the culprits, that would be great."

"Oh! You could make an illusion so that it looks to them like there's something going on up at the Head table and while they're looking, the prank happens!" Narvi interrupted.

"Uh-huh! If they're already looking up, then when the teachers look for scapegoats, its already obvious that they're the ones who did it! 'Cause of course they'd want to see their prank taking place!" Vali agreed.

"Mm, but what if they try to comment on this something-happening-at-the-Head-table illusion?" I asked. "Then we'd be a little out of luck. They'd notice if nobody else reacted to the illusion and would figure out that they're being set up."

Really, it's not that big of a deal that they figure out early that there's mischief afoot. They'll know as soon as the first teacher gets their tongue under control that they'll be in trouble for something that they didn't do.

While my siblings talk out how they would do this, Sleipnir and I start weaving the spells we were talking about. I'll apply them later to the Toad's cup, but right now I'll do the testing for them.

They work spectacularly the next morning. My younger siblings came up with the idea of making an illusory noise at the Head table just before the prank took place. That way the twins didn't have any time to really react but they still looked like the expectant masterminds behind the whole thing.

As soon as the teachers take a sip of their drinks, I switch some itching powder into their drinks. Every they pick up their goblets, I add a little powder to the drink.

The real masterpiece is the Toad, though. She starts screaming as soon as the hot sauce hits her tongue, and with every other teacher busy choking on itching powder, there's no one to really help her. Not that they'd be able to. I stuck Permanent Sticking charms to the chairs and set them to attract robes only. That way the teachers would have to strip – bonus points for public humiliation! – in order to leave their seats.

The student body, Weasleys included, stare in bewildered horror at their suffocating teachers. Itching powder is not supposed to be consumed for a good reason.

Finally, useless Hermione jumps to her feet and starts casting spells to clear the airways. All prefects are required to learn them prior to the school year just in case something happens to the younger kids. The Ravenclaws soon join in, and as soon as Madam Pomphrey's throat is cleared of itching powder, she goes to help the other teachers.

It's a wonderful sort of chaos. Best of all, the Weasley Twins are blamed for it.

This is what true – mostly benign – revenge looks like. Now if only we could use that against the Asgardians…

The Christmas Holidays are predated by a string of "violent displays of rebellion against the Ministry's power" as the Toad likes to call it, or "increasingly unacceptable reactions to the new changes in the school" as most other teachers say. In actuality, the itching powder prank continues until all of the packets of itching powder I have are gone, and by the time the Christmas holidays happen, the teachers are triple-checking not only their goblets for the powder but every single bite of food they take.

It still doesn't help them avoid it. I merely switch the stuff onto their forkful or into their drink moments before it enters their mouth.

The Toad never manages to convince the other teachers that she is not being attacked by itching powder because they can't see it, and she doesn't know what the non-magical condiment is.

The Weasleys are put mostly permanently in detention, and after the fifth day of it, Dumb-as-Fudge-the-Minister actually confiscates their wands to prevent it from happening. It doesn't change anything, so Lee Jordan – whoever that is – is blamed next, and eventually the blame falls on my so-called siblings.

Snape would blame me as well, but I suspect that my…talk…with the whole of Slytherin House back when Hel first came to here is still frightening him out of confronting me.

Ha. Me: 239, Him: 0.

I always knew that we Lockesons were superior to the rest of the world. Father raised us well indeed.

A/N: So yeah… this only took several months to write. I had the first two stories bouncing around in my head, fully finished. The third one…I started rambling about my theories on why the Potters didn't have this amazing, fully warded, impenetrable mansion that you see all the time in fanfiction, and I ended up making it the third story instead of this ridiculous off-topic ending to the second one.

On the characters themselves…

M-C 1: I just love the idea that there was really a female Founder, and all the (period-typical) sexism resulted in them being rewritten as a man. Except, there had to be a reason why Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff were remembered as female, and you can't really try to erase the genders of the members of the royal family…so that's why they became princesses in a nutshell. Why Gryffindor? I had one motivation for picking the legendary lion-heart to gender swap: Imagine Noseless!Voldemort's face if he found out he was Gryffindor's Heir. I just have this image of him in my head where those two nostril slits have turned into actually round holes and his eyes are bulging and he's got his fingers digging into the corners of his mouth and yanking his lips down – basically his face just looks really hilariously distorted. And that's about the only reason I picked Gryffindor, honestly.

Also, Gwendolyn's Pitchfork is a Thing. It was the bane of Salazar's existence and if you have any issue with this, please take a moment to imagine her smacking all the sexist old coots (who somehow outlived the Founders despite already being ancient when the Founders all met) with it while they choke on their tongues at the sight of her. Can't imagine it and still won't believe it? Fight me.

Actually, no, don't. I don't like fighting.

My brother, while reading this, mentioned that he didn't understand the concept of the First Words Au. The basic idea is that the first words a pair of soulmates will ever say to one another is written somewhere on their bodies in the speaker's handwriting. If Person A says something to Person B, and Person B says something else to Person A in response, then Person A will have Person B's words to them in Person B's handwriting on their body. Person B will have Person A's words to them in Person A's handwriting on their body. Also, the colors of the words don't really matter, but I like to think that they represent the speaker's personality.

M-C 2: Stalker husband Death is the ultimate master of the Pathetic Puppy Eyes tm. You cannot convince me otherwise. It's probably the only reason Ianthe sat through his explanation on why he was following her instead of just hexing him and leaving.

M-C 4: I don't even know. My version of Order is just – you don't see it in the story all that much since it focuses on the game, but he is just so chill about the weirdest things. It's like Paradox's craziness has become so routine to him that he has become crazy too, and when he sees someone who isn't used to Paradox he's just like – "Why are you looking so confused by the rainbow-afro-wearing, Atomic-Orange-flavored-sherbet-eating llamas? It's hot out and those afro wigs are very itchy. Of course the llamas are going to eat ice-cold sherbet." And then he just turns around and looks at Paradox, who's cracking up and not even trying to hide it, and goes, "I don't understand. What's wrong with everyone?"

And there are other times, too, when he's concentrating on something and Paradox just taps him on the shoulder to ask him something. So Order/Language – that was his original name in the rough draft, but I was told my perfect-opposite pairings didn't make any sense, which to be fair, the rough draft versions of Fenris and Vili were called Wolf and Lemur respectively – looks up at Paradox and you can just tell from that absent expression on his face that his mind is a million miles away. And Paradox just gives him this crazy grin and crows something about llamas and taking over Africa and forcing people to worship llamas and Order just – he just smiles at him and says "Okay dear, whatever you say." and goes back to reading. Like, he's not even paying attention and Paradox knows that, and he takes shameless advantage of that fact. Half of his crazier ideas get approval because he asks while Order's head is in the clouds.

Seriously, if Order has a catchphrase, it is without a doubt, "Okay dear, whatever you say." He is literally so out of touch with normal behavior that half the time he doesn't even see anything wrong with the way Paradox is acting. That book of his? The Trials and Tribulations of Social Etiquette? Yeah, Life handwrote that because he needed guidelines for proper public behavior so very badly. Just imagine the worst social disaster you can think of, and I can bet you Order has topped that without ever realizing it.

And just – these two are avoided by most other deities precisely because of this. Because of Paradox and his not always pleasant spontaneity and the llamas and Order's hit-or-miss-but-mostly-miss ability to rein him in and the llamas. Definitely the llamas. Contrary to Order's expectations, most people are not prepared to deal with the llamas.

M-C 5: Rowan is Perpetually Pissed Off tm (and more than a little done with his job). When I imagine him, I think of this eternally seventeen year old kid wearing the weirdest outfit, and he's just screaming at the top of his lungs. Like, yelling is his default volume. And then you just have Mr. Bowel-Control-Problems bouncing around his legs and it's adorable but also weirdly terrifying because there's this kid screaming louder unaided than some people can get with a Sonorus to make themselves louder and there's this puppy acting like it's totally normal for a human to literally be grinding a Dementor's face into the ground with his boot.

But all joking aside, he actually gets along really well with Death. They binge-watch anime together and Death does listen when Rowan gives suggestions for the uniform. He just has a policy that Rowan has to give each outfit a try for at least a week before he can veto it. (And then the Siberia Bathing Suit Incident happened and all plans for Adam and Eve-style plant clothing went out the window along with Death's tentative plans for Free! cosplay.)

I actually really like writing Rowan. He's just a breath of fresh air. Like, Order in M-C 4 had this completely-disconnected-from-reality point of view, but he also tended to get really wordy when talking about his research. Jordan in M-C 6 has the typical Asgardian outdated/formal speech patterns that he picked up from his dad, but he's also still mentally the equivalent of a teenager and a really bored and angry one living in the modern era at that. There's a really huge difference in the way both characters talk and respond depending on the situation, and while I have set "triggers" for the speech pattern change (i.e. Order's research mode, and Jordan's past) there are times when their speech patterns blend together. Writing them is kind of exhausting.

But Rowan. As I said before, he is a breath of fresh air. You have no idea how big of a relief it was to write a character that has one set speech pattern, and whose entire chapter was basically his internal monologue about how frustrating his job was. He was just really frustrated the entire first part of his rant, and then he started to calm down and ramble about other things – like spa days. Honestly? Internally ranting is probably his favorite form of stress relief in his job.

I just want to get this out here, but Rowan's sexual preference is Competent. He Does Not Appreciate tm all of the innuendo about him and his boss, because as far as he's concerned, Death is the annoying kind of competent where everything is pushed off to the last minute and is very possibly just barely good enough to qualify for the prestigious title of "Being Good At What You Do".

Also, for those of you who read M-C 3 and M-C 4 instead of scanning the titles and reading only ones that interested you, yes, Oliver Contraire was based off of Paradox. It never got mentioned since Paradox outed himself so quickly, but Oliver Contraire was actually the name he went by during his week as a human. You'll eventually see the llama-loving brunet again if I ever get around to writing the Katekyo Hitman Reborn! crossover I have. Just spoiler alert: He's not any better about the llamas when he has kids to look out for. Regulus had better be glad that Oliver wasn't that serious about forcibly changing their names to Regullama and Ollama.

M-C 6: Anyone who read the first (*goes back and checks the Word document*) ten paragraphs of this one knows that Jordan has Anger Issues and Family Issues. Loki and Sleipnir are right to worry about his temper.

I tried to portray this angry kid who never really got over what happened to him and his family when he was younger. Despite all the resentment, though, he really loves his immediate family and fusses over both Hel and Fenris to a ridiculous degree. I think that Professors McGonagall and Snape would have tried harder to force the younger two to return to their House dormitories if it wasn't so blatantly obvious that Jordan was the most overprotective sibling in the whole school.

Not that they know that the three of them are siblings. As far as the Hogwarts staff knows, the Potters have the Quidditch star and adrenalin junkie Jason, the fashion obsessed and boy crazy Rose, and this one really moody, snappish, disobedient child who is – despite all of his personality flaws and general refusal to do his work and complete lack of a magical upbringing – a verifiable genius at magic in general. And then Dumbledore announces the revival of the Triwizard Tournament, and the next day at breakfast a first year Slytherin goes up to the Most Terrifying Hufflepuff Ever tm, and suddenly the psycho-seeming badger is just the most adoring person in the world. No one gets it.

And you'd think that the Slytherins would put a stop to it, but Snape comes down to the Common Room to fetch Crabbe and Goyle – because four years in, they're still almost failing, there are actually first years doing better than them and it's only the second week of school – and just stops. Because Potter the youngest is in the Slytherin Common Room and he's smiling and his teeth don't fit his mouth. They're way too long and Snape would think that he's a vampire, but these are curved and longer than any vampire's fangs he's ever seen. Then Potter Junior – the badger Potter no less, what is the world coming to – hisses and the entire room shakes. It's not just because all of the snake decorations are moving, are tying everyone up when they're spelled against animation, no, but that is part of the problem.

The problem is that there are some noises pitched so low you can feel them vibrate in your bones, and somehow Badger Potter manages to hiss at a pitch so low Snape will swear until the day he dies that the ground itself vibrates with it.

It's terrifying. Just when they thought Badger Potter's reputation as the scariest and most unapproachable student around has finally begun to fall apart, he comes along and does this. They just. They can't. Someone pisses themselves and no one will ever make fun of them because this guy is really this frightening.

And you know what he's there for? He wants them to treat his little first year friend nicely. He doesn't want anything but nice behavior to a little girl he happens to know from outside school. The snakes cannot believe this.

Then somebody with a death wish points out that Slytherins never do anything for free and that he'll owe them a favor for being nice to an outcast. Potter smiles again. Then he starts hissing again. A moment later all the snakes get bigger and open their mouths right next to their heads, and Potter?

Potter just stands there grinning at them, and suddenly everyone – even Crabbe and Goyle – notice that his teeth look exactly like the fangs in these snakes' mouths. "I'll give you one chance to apologize for your treatment of little Helena, and for that statement. If you don't…well. These guys haven't eaten in a thousand years. I'm sure they're starving."

And yeah, that's basically why Slytherin House is nice to Hel. It's one thing to terrify a little girl slumming it with the Light side; it's an entirely different thing to terrify a little girl whose friend and surrogate older brother threatened to have the Common Room's decorations eat them. They sleep there. Where would they even go to avoid them?

In the meantime, Dumbledore is pacifying a freaked out Jason and James and Rose, and telling them that no, he's sure that Harry is just being nice to the poor confused snake, he's not going Dark – despite literally years' worth of evidence that Harry does not care about anyone other than himself – in his office. And he's probably wondering what the heck is going on and that tiny voice in the back of his head that still, after all this time, sounds like Grindelwald, says maybe… And then he's thinking that maybe the lack of concern for others and the continued association with a baby Slytherin means that Harry is going Dark. Then the fiasco with the two extra champions happens, and there's even more evidence piling up – the Boy-Who-Lived and his sister are in a deadly tournament, yet the genius brother isn't? What is this madness? – but then Voldemort comes back and no one believes Jason and everything's going bottom's up.

And then Umbridge shows up at school and Dumbledore resigns himself to another awful year. Then a first year, Frederick Lockeson-Wolfe, is Sorted into Gryffindor, and he's about to clap for the lad, but he doesn't even go to his House table. He practically runs over to the Hufflepuff one, and for a moment, Dumbledore wonders if he got confused – Gryffindor and Hufflepuff share a House color, even though Gryffindor is more of a goldenrod than Hufflepuff's pastel yellow – but no, as soon as the boy sits down, Harry hugs him, and just. What?

Everything seems to go downhill from there. Someone boos at the Gryffindor table, and then the bewildered but offended badgers close ranks around the little lion, and Minerva never actually gets the first year to come back to his dormitory. The house elves actually move his trunk to the Hufflepuff one.

Hermione (and Ron, but mostly just Hermione) frequently stop by his office to complain that the Hufflepuff prefects are interfering with her (their) duties as Gryffindor prefect and are refusing to send the little lion back where he belongs, but Dumbledore just can't deal with all this. He'd prepared for complaints of Umbridge's abuse of power from the children, and it's actually worse than he initially thought – blood quills, Dolores?! Blood quills?! – and then he learns that Harry hasn't shown up to class since day one, and those two kids he's taken in didn't even show up to their first DADA class. Voldemort is still on the loose somewhere, the Minister isn't listening to any of his urgings, Jason may or may not have a Horcrux in his head, and Lily and James are going to kill him when they find out what he's suspected for fifteen years but never did anything about.

He needs a break and a bottle of Firewhiskey. At least Harry can't be going Dark if he's getting along with a Muggleborn Gryffindor, right?

But yeah, massive digression/the backstory of how Hel and Fenris joined Hufflepuff aside, Jordan just has anger issues. He's super overprotective as far as his family is concerned – Exhibit A, the visit to Slytherin – but he has a lot of pent up anger. This takes place right after the first Avengers movie, so Loki's been taken away in chains, and none of his kids are dealing with his absence well.

You can't see it on-screen, but Sleipnir is extremely stressed. He goes back to veterinary school once every few decades since – remember, during the Great Escape from Asgard, he took up livestock care – it's pretty much become his specialty. Everyone needs a doctor to make sure the meat they will eventually eat is healthy, so it's a pretty good business for him and he has the benefit of a lot of experience doing it.

However, right now, he's juggling a pair of anxious twelve year olds, school work, a part time job to pay for his schooling expenses, the twins' school work since they won't remember to do it without him prompting them, handling Jordan's temper issues, and calming down his youngest siblings over a long distance. Plus, he's not sure if Thor will be back, if anybody's noticed he's gone – what if the illusion hiding his escape fell while Dad was mind-controlled? – and maybe at the back of his head, there are tentative escape plans forming. Not for him or for his siblings, no. But for Loki, who's being tortured for something he didn't do, just like they were tortured for things out of their hands.

Pointless, senseless violence is one of his least favorite things, especially when it's directed at the family members he actually likes.

Anyway…since I'm sure some of you were wondering this, Sleipnir is physically about 25. Jordan is normally about 19. Narvi, Vali, and Hel were born close enough together that they all appear to be about 12-13 years old. Fenris is about 8. I stopped where I did because, honestly, my inspiration for M-C 6 started running out about a month before I gave in and wrote that ending. I'll come back and finish it in another chapter, but for right now, I am just so done with it.

Please don't take that to mean that it will show up in one of chapter 2 of this fanfic's micro-chapters; I'm already writing M-C 1 and M-C 2 of chapter 2, and I am not ready to write the end of this 'verse in there. I need a break from malicious, serpentine Lockesons. (Jordan is so exhausting.)

Justin does find out eventually – mostly by accident – that Hel is his soulmate. Let it be known that hurt Hufflepuffs are horrifyingly good at guilt-tripping people with the infamous Puppy Dog Pout, and while Jordan is more or less immune to the pouting and whims of anyone who isn't in his immediate family, Hel feels awful for abandoning a boy who was nothing but kind to her. It's not like he was like that one guy back in the seventh century who had a very disturbing interest in little girls after all… It's been literal ages since then and Justin's been the epitome of polite behavior for these past few lives so surely he's moved on from that one awful life…

Justin doesn't know anything about this, of course. Nobody is going to tell him and he doesn't exactly retain memories of his past lives.

When Fenris' eighty-something year old soulmate dies, he's reborn as Teddy Lupin. This is actually how Justin finds out that Hel is his soulmate.

Justin went on to become the Muggle Studies teacher – because clearly the wizards don't have a clue what they're doing as far as muggles are concerned; Exhibit A: they tried to Obliviate the Avengers when they saw the Scarlet Witch using magic around "the stupid muggles", how are they this dumb? – and he's there when a boy who vanished more than ten years before comes to say hello to Teddy. And yet, more than a decade after the Battle of Hogwarts, the little lion who denned with the badgers somehow hasn't aged a bit and that shouldn't be possible.

So of course, Justin goes up to Fenris and he's all like "I haven't seen you in a while, little badger cub. Where've you gotten off to in recent times?" and Fenris just squeaks and looks horribly guilty and Teddy's just standing there in confusion, looking back and forth between the two of them.

Finally, Teddy can't stand the silence and tells Justin that Fenris is his soulmate and he looks so awestruck that the 'Puff beams at him and asks what his description says, and Teddy says, "Godwolf." like it makes sense (but of course it doesn't, because Teddy has no proof that Fenris' his soulmate other than the other boy's word, but being with him feels so right and his name rings a bell somewhere in the back of his head and Teddy gets so much déjà vu just looking at him that he must be right).

And Justin blinks and looks at Fenris like staring at him will somehow make the description make sense, and it understandably doesn't help at all. Fenris shuffles in place for a little bit, and finally explains – he's never been all that good about hiding things, he'd always had his siblings to do that for him – that yeah, that's a title for him and maybe he kind of, sort of, possibly let it slip to Justin that Helena Graves, who also disappeared at the end of the war along with him and Justin's old dorm mate, was actually Justin's soulmate.

And Justin is…he's in shock. And then he snaps out of it and he wants to know more – because let's face it, no one was closer to Helena Graves or Frederick Wolfe-Lockeson than Harry was and that includes Helena's old friends at Hogwarts, so if anyone knows what happened to them it's probably Harry who might have taken them with him when he left and that means that they've all been together all this time – and Fenris just clams up and won't look him in the eye.

Teddy is the only reason the conversation goes anywhere. He remembers that Fenris said that he's the youngest of six kids and Helena was the name of his older sister, so Teddy starts asking questions and while Fenris might be resolved to not answer Justin anymore, he can't do the same to Teddy. So Fenris calls his siblings and Sleipnir gets there in record time – not difficult considering Sleipnir is known to be the fastest horse alive for a reason – and while Fenris' big brother is a little disappointed in him, he's much more concerned with making sure that they know better than to tell anybody.

But Justin does get to meet his soulmate again – and learn just how old they are, which just blows his mind but at the same time it explains so much about them – and while they're having their reunion, Teddy and Fenris have a chat.

And that's when Teddy learns that you're not always reincarnated as a human, because according to Fenris, the longest they've spent together in a single life was 272 years when Teddy was born as a Ukrainian Ironbelly. And that just amazes Teddy, he's literally speechless, but Fenris is just sitting there next to him complaining about how he had to be so careful with Teddy that life because while they could play Tag together, Fenris had to be careful and make sure that he didn't step on him by accident. So, Teddy starts wondering how big Fenris is, that he had to be careful to not step on a full-grown Ukrainian Ironbelly, which are already notoriously huge, and when he asks the answer is really freaking huge. Like, he doesn't even want to imagine how huge Fenris can grow in wolf form.

Hey, I figured that if, in some myths at least, Fenris' children are large enough to swallow stars, then their old man has to be ginormous. Not that Fenris is Sköll and Hati's father. Nope. They're just a pair of (*cough*immortal*cough*) dire wolf pups he adopted way back when, and they're basically his playmates when Teddy's not around. Remember how Jordan and Sleipnir used the shadows to Skype each other? Yeah, they do the same, but instead of talking to people, they use them to stalk people.

By the way, since I know I find this confusing and you might not be as inclined to scavenge for mostly-accurate North Mythology sites, Sköll is a boy who supposedly chases the sun and will eat it in order to start Ragnarök. At the same time that his brother will eat the sun, Hati – also a boy – will do the same to the moon. For some reason that I can't quite pin down, though, I keep thinking of Sköll as a girl.

Yeah, that was basically the Viking interpretation of a solar/lunar eclipse. Fun, right? There was probably a lot of screaming involved whenever they saw eclipses happen. And to think that we all flock to see one!