Disclaimer: This is purely a work of fanfiction, no copyright infringement is intending to be made. No money is being made.
Summery: The Master of Death is sent to be more interesting in a dimension filled with Time travelling, space ships, aliens, and exploration and adventures where no one has gone before.
A/N: This chap references characters and events from Star Trek: TOS "City on the Edge of Forever" S1E28.
This chap is short, as I am picking up the pace of HP's time in the past.
Chapter 3: A Classic Begins- Part 2.
Henry couldn't take any time off of work to grieve in peace, there was always a needy soul waiting in the wings to take his job, and while San Francisco wasn't quite as bad as some of the other cities, since it hadn't been forced to close its banks and had the good sense to invest in a couple major construction projects that provided work, the streets were nevertheless still overflowing with the out of work homeless. If you wanted the basic necessities of life, even if they may not be all of them from time to time, you worked, no matter the situation.
So Henry worked. He was methodical and efficient, and if the Foreman and a few of his co-workers occasionally shot him pitying looks and shared the occasional bit of their sausage or sip of coffee, it was never talked about.
Eventually a week turned into a month.
Henry eventually got another roommate to help out with the shared rent on the flop, a nice Italian widower who lost his family in the boat ride to America during a storm. As a result, the man was still grieving, the loss still fresh, and thus was not inclined to being chummy, which was convenient for Henry.
Tony was also relatively fit, despite the arduous boat trip, and was able to pull in the work twice as much as Henry. Henry was the sort who believed in everyone pulling a relatively equal amount of fair share, baring capabilities, so once in awhile when Tony would bring home an extra wedge of cheese and bacon to share with their meager supper, Henry in turn mended Tony's cloths and got him extra work on the bridge when a position opened up.
They weren't friends, but they commiserated in their mutual experience of loss, and proved the old adage that misery really does indeed love company.
Ooo ooo ooo
'Its gotten to be that a person can't even hang their laundry out to dry without it being snatched from one's fire escape,' Henry grumbled mentally, 'though the bloke who stole them wasn't bad looking,' as he recounted the brief flash of laughing hazel eyes and carmel blond hair. He hadn't looked desperate, from what Henry had seen of the brief look of him through his back window before the bloke had made off with Tony's spare work cloths that Henry had been cleaning.
He never got them back of course, he never expected to, but he had to work extra shifts to buy Tony replacements, feeling responsible in part to their theft.
A week later he had just dropped off the new cloths back home, and realized he had enough on him to afford the latest Amazing Detective Stories magazine, an indulgence of Henry's, so he had gone out to pick one up before he was to start his night shfit.
It was as he was walking to work, magazine shoved into his back pocket, that he witnessed an odd sight.
A man dressed in some sort of pale blue cross between a uniform and pajamas seemed to appear out of no where across the street, and began staggering around, yelling about assassins.
It was not totally uncommon to see men deep in their bottles these days raving in the streets. Henry knew intimately the cold comfort of the bottle, but this fellow didn't look so much drunk as alarmingly ill.
Sweaty short brown hair stuck up in every direction, revealing a deathly pale face molted with almost lesion-like patches of purple. His blue eyes looked almost filmy, and there were flicks of saliva in the corner of his mouth.
It was possible there was more then booze involved drugs was also a fairly common escape. The man spotted Henry who was frozen in curiosity watching him, and lunged forward grabbing his shoulders and shaking him, demanding their location. Henry didn't smell a lick of alcohol on him, just sweat and desperation. So madness, drugs or both then.
"San Fransisco," Henry answered calmly, "Harper Street."
The man, still gripping his shoulders and looking around himself, wild eyed, scoffed, "that's impossible! This must be some sort of illusion!" the crazed man snatched Henry's cap off his head, and began examining his skull, "you certainly look humanoid enough to pass as human."
The man pushed away and staggered backwards, leaning heavily against a nearby wall. "I mean, its a regular museum piece! Right down to the cement pillars!" he patted said ordinary cement pillar.
Henry raised a brow.
Then the man seemed to seize up for a moment, before his eyes rolled back into his head. Henry was just in time to catch him before he fell.
Henry grunted, shifting the figure until he managed to get the 40 something man into a loose fireman's carry.
Luckily or unluckily for Henry, there was a mission not to far away. A Mission that he was all to painfully familiar with, and staggered in that direction.
When the door of the mission opened, some part of him thought that surely, surely someone as smart and wonderful as Her would no longer be here anymore. It had been so long for awhile...
Unfortunately though, She had to answer the knock. Henry gave the recognizable brunette an awkward grin, the woman's face falling into shock, then anger as he shifted his unconscious bundle and said "Hey Edith, long time no see.'
ooo ooo ooo
In the comforting, snug warmth of the back room he remembered so well, Edith Keller, the matron of the shelter, stared at him stonily while Henry figited nervously under the women's gaze.
"Well Henry, it has been awhile," she finally intoned.
"Um well, I don't think its been that long..." he dared to speak awkwardly.
"10 years Henry," she snapped at him like a whiplash, making the man grimace.
He frowned to himself, as he mentally calculated in his head, then realized that, yes it had been 10 years.
Henry grimaced again, had it been that long? He really needed to keep abreast of that. He hadn't realized he had lingered in the same place for so long, though for blokes who are without end, years sometimes can blink by faster then light.
"10 years since I found you as naked as the day you were born in some back alley like you did this unfortunate, though oddly dressed soul. Without a name to you let alone cloths. I took you in, bathed you, clothed you, nursed you to some semblance of sanity, then you had the gall, the absolute nerve to be so charming, so deep that I fell in love with you!" She stared at him accusingly, as Henry turned his eyes away from her and stared down at the unconscious man currently prone on a spare cot "Then that night together. I...understood that you couldn't return my affections the same way that I loved you, I understood that there was something about you that would have never settled down with a simple woman such as myself," her tone turned almost faraway, a look that reminded Henry uncomfortably of a certain blond girl spouting about nargles in another life, so long ago.
"But when you disappeared the next day, without even a letter! And here you are a decade later with a sick man strung over your shoulder and all you can say is "long time no see?!'
Henry expected it coming, but didn't bother to dodge the fist that smashed into his face. He yelped as his nose was broken and blood flowed down his face, dripping from his chin.
Edith shook her hand with a grimace, though judging from her expression any injury she might have accrued had still been worth it.
"I named you," she said quietly. And that quiet disappointment in her voice somehow hurt more then his nose.
Henry turned his head away, grabbing a nearby rag and attempting to staunch the flow, his memories touching briefly on their memorable encounter.
Edith had been a Merlin send to him when he had first found himself in a body again, dumped by Death in 1920's San Fransisco. She was a good woman with strong convictions, firm hand but still compassionate, and she had found him, took him under her wing and helped him like no other. It wasn't hard to be attracted to her, particularly after so many decades of loneliness, so scared to be as close to anyone as he had been to Ginny, and for a time she made him forget that. he had given into it, and took her in his arms and the two had made love, and for a time in the coitus of pleasure, his head pillowed on her breast, he realized that he could very easily love her. In slumber within her arms, he had dreamed of Ginny, and when he awoke, he had realized what a huge mistake he had made.
Certainly he could choose to settle down with Edith, maybe even marry her, but in the end it was as doomed to failure as his first marriage. Edith was for all intents and purposes a seemingly ordinary human women, she had an unusually exceptional foresight, and a charisma that would see her well in politics if she ever set her sights higher, but normal all the same. She would not understand someone...something like him, and would send him away just as Ginny had.
So he had left, to spare them both. Perhaps it was selfish, yes. But it was also an honest mercy.
Edith sighed, anger draining away as she shook her head in exasperation, saying with that odd insight of hers "I suppose I should not have been surprised, you were always a man on the edge of forever, and looking back on it now, I don't think I would have been the one to stand there with you."
Henry stood up abruptly under those always shinning wide eyes.
"I need to go Edith."
"Wait!" Edith exclaimed grabing his sleeve as he passed. He halted.
They stood in strained tableau for a moment and Henry found himself asking.
"Are you...Are you happy Edith?"
Edith answered without pause.
"Yes Henry, I have found someone, he...he see's the world like I do, like you did to."
Henry huffed a breath, before turning and grasping the woman's hand, vibrant green eyes from behind wire rimmed spectacles meeting fathomless brown, "No Edith, not like you, not like your new Beau, and that was part of why I left."
Edith sighed, letting her hand drop without another word, and Henry whirled around and left. Both knowing that this was the last they would see of each other.
ooo ooo ooo
The next day, after exchanging playful jabs with Mac the newspaper man, both bemoaning baseball, and arranging for Henry to take a temporary job delivering papers while Mac's regular paper boy was out sick, Henry left with a newspaper that would spout a small article in the back about the tragic car accident of Edith Keller, prominent community philanthropist.
Henry didn't go into work that day.
In fact, he didn't show up to work the next day, or the day after that. When Pat came by the flop to check in on Henry, Tony informed the man that Henry had left.
ooo ooo ooo
4 years later, New York City...
"You can't believe what a delight it is for me to meet you Mr. Tormé, coffee?'
Jay J. Stanley had been in the pulp magazine business for some time now. He had seen a lot of writers come and go, some hack talents, some marginal, and some true gems, gems like the young man sitting across from him.
He had no illusions that his magazine was anything but moderately successful. Since that Metropolis Picture came out in '27, it had galvanized the young writers into a more spectacular Science Fiction genre, and mystery zines such as his were suddenly second banana. He'd been forced to open the magazine up to other genre's to accommodate for competition, but Mystery was still the primary drive.
Then one day, sitting in his intake box was a short story "The Big Good Bye" featuring the tale of gumshoe Dixon Hill.
At first glance it was a character that appeared no different then any other private detective, but under that staple tan trench coat, snappy fedora and tie, was a man brimming with cynicism and optimism in equal measures. A man of humor and wit, and a mind as keen as a modern day Sherlock Holmes, perhaps with eyes that were to bright sometimes.
When the last edition of the pulp was released with Dixon Hill enjoying the view from his office window over looking San Fransisco in the back, nothing was expected to be any different from any other sort of release.
But only days later, Stanley's inbox was practically overflowing with demands for more Dixon Hill stories, interspersed with gushing praise and near, almost alarming zealous desire for more.
Stanley had scrambled for the author's contact information.
The youth sitting across from him was dressed rather sloppily in a grey button up and denim breeches. His dark black hair was not slicked back, as was the fashion for young men, but instead was loose and flyaway, as if combs were a foreign concept. He wore round wire rimmed spectacles that perched on a pert nose, and nary a blooming whisker to be found on his chin. Ah to be young again!
"No coffee thanks," the author replied, "you called me and said it was urgent? Was there something wrong with my submission?"
"No, no, in fact it s quite the opposite!" Jay J chortled around the cigar between his teeth, "it seems that the public rather enjoyed your story young man, that's why your here."
Jay J used his considerable talents in persuasion and negotiation, and had soon persuaded the young writer in a steady supply of Dixon Hill for his ravenous readers. After the particulars were taken care of, Jay J felt himself compelled to ask.
"I have to ask kid, Dixon is such an enigmatic character!, what inspired you in his creation?"
The young man smiled, though there was a sad little edge to it, "he was inspired by a few people I knew not to long ago, people that I loved...nothing more nothing less."
ooo ooo ooo
A/N: Cookies to those who guessed that our main character ended up becoming the other of the Dixon Hill series favored by Picard from Star Trek TNG.
"Mac" the Newspaper man was from the first appearance of Dixon Hill in the Star Trek series.
Jay J. is a vague reference to J. Jonah Jamison from Spiderman, mainly because he is the epitome newspaper/zine head honcho that pops up into my mind whenever I think of them.