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Watching over the dead was not a particularly interesting job, as Hel viewed it. Sure, it had seemed like the better option when Odin had forced the position on her (what with the fact that the All-Father had chained one of her brothers and thrown the other into the sea to confine them – at least she got to rule over her own kingdom and had some measure of respected power among the Æsir), but as time went on, she realized just how dull it was to be Queen of a realm that, for the most part, only the old and feeble or sick entered.

Occasionally she got someone interesting (like a hero who died outside of battle and therefore fell into her jurisdiction instead of joining the ranks of fallen warriors in Valhalla, or someone like Baldur, who she liked to think of as a bit of a present from her father to her), but those were few and far between, leaving her to listen to the same old stories of normal lives as souls entered her domain rather than anything interesting.

So was it any surprise that, rather than being appalled at the level of destruction and sheer loss of life that he was causing, she was actually a little flattered and quite amused by the lengths a certain Titan went to in order to get her attention? Oh, she'd never give Thanos the time of day – he'd had his chance and ruined it, not to mention what he'd tried to do with her father (Hel wasn't exactly fond of Loki, but family was family, and trying to turn the Trickster god into someone who thought ruling over beings he viewed as ants would be more fun than causing all sorts of chaos among his own people was just plain wrong) – but his actions did serve to alleviate the boredom that came with her job.

Like right now. In the mirror that allowed her to view the worlds at large while cozied away in her throne room (by all that was Deathly in all the realms, that chair was the most comfortable thing she'd ever sat in – Deaths always got the best chairs), she watched the Titan attempt to gather the Infinity Stones, his plots and plans sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing miserably, but never did they cease to amuse.

Honestly, if this were the sort of thing that mortals viewed on television, she could see why they would sit on their couches all day with eyes glued to those screens. It was certainly better than focusing on her own daily dullness. She didn't even mind the influx of souls into her realm – she'd appointed minions to sort them out, and only those with an entertaining tale would be brought before her.

She should have known that it couldn't last though. With the massive scale on which Thanos played at winning her affection, it was only a matter of time before he drew the attention of someone other than herself.

Still, she couldn't say she was expecting it when the mirror's image cut out, black and silver lightning appearing a few feet in front of her, her stomach dropping when she realized the implications of the rapidly forming portal. She had just seconds to right herself on her throne (having been sitting in the position that was the epitome of relaxed entertainment, feet slung over the arm and practically laying down in the seat) before the man that was the only being in the universe that could actually scare of the Queen of Hel stepped through.

"Master Death! What a nice surprise–" she started in a falsely cheerful voice, but was interrupted before she could finish the greeting.

"Do you have any idea the amount of paperwork that is piling up because of you?" The black-haired man spat, his green-eyed gaze snapping with irritation and frustration, the silver and black lightning of the portal matched by that sparking in his hair.

"I–" he steamed right on, her wide-eyed expression and attempt to speak ignored – apparently listening to her was not what he had in mind, and Hel tried to gird herself against what most mortals would equivocate to their boss chewing them out for improperly done work.

"I am literally being buried in the wretched stuff! My office is full of it! There isn't even a centimeter of space not occupied by paperwork. It is covering my chair." Here Hel would have paled to the shade of a ghost if she had been capable of losing any more color from her face – if there was one thing in the universe that one did not mess with, it was this man's office chair, and it was with that seemingly ordinary statement that the death god knew she was in major trouble. There would be no talking her way out of this situation, even if she'd had a hundred times the ability of her silver-tongued father.

No one touched the Death's chair and continued their existence unscathed.

"How may I be of assistance to you, sir?" she said, her voice a tiny thing in the face of that realization, utterly resigned to whatever punishment or task her boss set for her.

Harry Potter, Master of Death, snorted. "You could have been 'of assistance' six years ago and stopped all this from being a problem then," he stated, his voice no less irritated, but at least containing a few less exclamation points.

"Now, you're going to go fix this mess. I don't care if you play nicey-nice with Thanos, or crush his infatuation to the point that he'll never think of killing anyone or anything again, or blast him out of existence. Just fix it!" Harry threw up his hands in a gesture of supreme exasperation.

Hel flinched and sank back into her chair before slowly nodding, feeling small. "Of course," she said smoothly, if quietly. "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

Harry, who had been in the process of turning around and marching back through his portal, stopped abruptly, his face wiped clean of expression, before he looked over his shoulder at her with a positively frightful grin. Hel immediately regretted asking the question.

"Why yes, I think there is," he said, his smile a most evil thing – yes, she most definitely regretting asking that question. "You can report to my office tomorrow at nine a.m. sharp. You'll be helping me with the paperwork your lover-boy has caused." With that, her boss stepped through the portal, leaving Hel alone in her throne room once more.

Only when she was sure he wouldn't hear her did she groan and bury her face in her hands. If there was anything more boring than watching over the dead, it was doing paperwork on them.


A/N: So that happened.

Inspired by The Plot Bunny Whisperer's crossover fic Deus Ex Machina and my own relationship with the dreaded monster of paperwork. (If you haven't read that fic, DO IT. Too funny.)

PS: A small note on the time period - drawing on information on what's coming up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this would be sometime 2018, set during the Infinity Wars. Hence the six years comment, when Thanos first started mucking about with trying to get the Tesseract/first Infinity Stone.