HP/ Sandman/ RWBY Crossover

You Get a Lifetime

Rating: M

This story is a Harry Potter / Sandman crossover (Ch 1-3) and HP / RWBY crossover (Ch 4-9). Harry Potter's universe belongs to J. K. Rowling. The Sandman belongs to Neil Gaiman. RWBY belongs to Monty Oum. There are several other shout-outs and most are listed after the epilogue.

Content rating is between T and M.

Feel free to use my ideas, but do drop me a message so I can read your story too. Comments on errors are welcome.

Harry leaves Britain to work for Death, before retiring to Remnant where he meets and lives with Blake.

Chapter 4 Retirement Benefits

Years pass. It would be unfair to say they pass in the blink of an eye, for that does not do justice to the tenacity of Death's beloved Minions, who do good work, day in and day out, for a great many years. Even this microscopic fraction of eternity will drive an average mortal insane, but Death chooses her champions well, and they weather the millennia splendidly.

Even so, all Minions eventually retire. Their contract with Death does not promise or grant them immortality. It allows them to choose their final moments, showing Mastery over the natural fears and self-doubt that plague a sentient being pondering its existence and purpose. All Minions, bar none, are preternaturally calm when they finally decide to die.


Harry periodically kept tabs on his native dimension even as he commuted to countless other worlds.

Seismic activity, glacial in a mortal's eyes, was gracefully fluid on a geological time scale. Harry's Earth shifted its continents beyond recognition. Species appeared, but a great deal more became extinct. The diversity of flora and fauna was a pale shadow of what once was, but humans lived on. Civilizations waxed and waned, fed by various fuels and torn down by war or pestilence. Much culture vanished from living memory, and there was nobody alive who knew the Story or its retellings.

Tens of human generations ago, a politician had suggested mining Earth's sole Moon for platinum and gold. A decade-long arms race later, several nations landed their people on the Moon and began to drill down to its core. War broke out on Earth and the teams on the Moon similarly sabotaged each other, on the assumption that the winner would be able to finance any war debt. When the lunar teams accidentally blew up half of the moon, all involved were horrified that the moon held not a sliver of precious metal.

Magic changed in strange ways.

The ley lines had petered out, and the great underground currents of raw magic which veined the planet and fed Hogwarts, Stonehenge, Ayers Rock and other monuments no longer flowed. In a desperate, almost sentient, attempt to keep humanity alive, Magic had possessed and slowly transformed the deposits of humanity's fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - into a volatile, energetic kind of powder dubbed Dust. This colossal act of transfiguration depleted Magic itself, and magic no longer existed in the air, land or sea, all the way down to the Earth's core.

Magical species struggled to adapt during the gradual but inexorable loss of magic.

Wizards and witches found that there was increasingly less magic absorbed into their bodies from food, drink or air. They developed a ritual to bind an individual's remaining magic to his soul. To their chagrin, this created an inaccessible pool of energy tied to the soul, so divergent from existing magic that no spell could utilize or unlock it.

Furthermore, the body became indistinguishable from Muggles', bleeding and ageing with no protection by bodily magic. Many traditionalist Purebloods refused the procedure, but most of the Wizarding World hung their heads low and did the ritual, hoping that someday, their children's children would develop a technique or aria to unlock magic again.

Some species studied the humans' failure and admitted that while they could not do better, they could hardly do worse. Kneazles, March Hares, Minotaurs and several others approached humans under the guise of spirit animals, offering to magically incorporate their traits into the human genome. An unprecedented number of adolescents and LARPers consented. While the resultant nucleic acids held no magic, they stored a variety of traits ranging from the obvious, like ears and tails, to the subtle, like strength, stamina and night vision. Posterity would give rise to the Faunus races.

In a moment of wisdom and solidarity, dragons decided to stop breeding. Dragons live to protect treasure, and the greatest gem was the Earth. Earth would never regain its shine, and dragon-kind was too ashamed to bequeath it. Within a generation, there were no dragons. Many species used the vestiges of their magic to activate atavistic genes, opting to give up magic instead of their lives. Phoenixes became lyrebirds and merfolk became dugongs.

Dementors chose a more sordid path. They were unique among magical beings in having no soul. They fed on emotions and souls and utilized them as raw magic. This magic held together mundane, non-magical debris in the vague shape of a hooded humanoid, and granted rudimentary verbal communication. When a Dementor amassed sufficient magic, a pinch of magic and matter would bud off as a proto-Dementor, which would feed and grow.

When the Dementors worldwide sensed the waning magic, they gathered at most populous country and consumed every iota of human memory and soul. Transiently intelligent, the Hive rewrote the blueprint of the species. They would be of flesh and blood, soulless, with exactly two instincts - to devour and reproduce. They would have black hides, whose absorption of sunlight would suffice to maintain existence and basic locomotion. They would track souls by negative emotions, and consume them to gain additional power for reproduction.

As one, the altered Dementors departed in all directions and merged with any living animal they could find, gaining their flesh and blood, biochemical mechanisms for reproduction, and brains - brains with a potential for intelligence, given time. Bears, birds, boars, snakes, fish, wolves and more were painfully converted into the grotesque precursors of what humankind eventually called the Grimm.

Surprisingly, while the Story had been completely forgotten, a fair number of fairy tales remained, in no small part thanks to mothers who whispered them to their children while fathers fought war after war. The tales had small influences on naming or the Arts.

Many languages were lost, along with their cultures and contexts. The current civilization, encompassing four kingdoms and some smaller settlements, spoke one language with a minimum of dialects, and had one signed language. Very few, even among archaeologists, researched older languages. One particular word from a distant generation was understood by the entire world, because it hinted at the madness that had ravaged the world into its current state, and succinctly described the despair, guilt and anger at having to eke a living off the dregs of a once-great world.

The current world was named "Remnant".


With his home world not far from its final hurrah, and an admirably lengthy term as a Minion of Death under his belt, Harry decided it was time to retire. Meeting with Death, he discussed how and when he wished to die, submitted the necessary forms, and made his preparations. He had long been freed of any prophecies binding him to Destiny's Book, but this dying world still had a large number of future events that needed to match the Book. As a parting gift, he would tie up a few of the loose ends.

With a deftness and surefootedness borne of experience, he traversed time and space on Remnant holding his Hallows.

The Resurrection Ring very weakly attracted Grimm because the ghosts previously summoned by the ring left a faintly soul-like presence. He cast the Ring into a forest between two trees of yew and holly. In a few days, it would perch on a spike of a clueless Ursa Major. Huntsmen and Grimm would serendipitously find and lose the Ring until it ended up on the island of Patch, west of Vale.

Closing his eyes in concentration, he communicated his intent to the Elder Wand, which acquiesced and morphed into a plain needle. This needle he did place within an egg, which lay within a duck, which lay within a hare, which lay within a chest wrought in Blue Digizoid metal. He placed the chest in the gizzard of the largest Nevermore in Atlas. Eventually, the Nevermore would swallow a careless Huntsman, who would then cut his way out of the gizzard and reveal chest's secrets. The innocuous needle would change hands in a bizarre series of murders before reaching the owner of a small dust mining company.

Applying a glamour spell, Harry approached a mountaineer hiding out a snowstorm in a cave. She had been challenging the tallest peak of Mistral, and now curled up freezing on the unforgiving ground. Harry silently commanded his Cloak of Invisibility to lock down its primary function of hiding from the visible spectrum, only to be reactivated when the three Hallows were gathered once more. Appearing as a huge Saint Bernard dog, Harry stated the Cloak's minor properties before draping it over the lass' shivering form. She would be rescued soon after.

As he was about to leave Remnant's mortal plains, he paused. He decided to make a token attempt at gifting his home planet with the Story once more. It would most assuredly be futile, but the Story was sacred among Minions, and he was disappointed that successive civilizations had dismissed it so completely.

Appearing in the house of a dozing playwright in Vacuo, Harry performed a wandless Legilimens spell and gave the woman a vivid dream of the original Story, set to dominate her waking hours until she penned it down. Magic of Harry's generation did not exist on Remnant, except for the Hallows now, and their owners would know no magic. Consequently, the Story never inspired a hunt for the Hallows and would merely be treated as a sub-par fairy tale.


Final farewells between Minions have traditionally been cheery for several reasons.

Firstly, there is no worry over whether they will move on to Hell or Heaven, because both are denied to Minions. When a Minion retires, he is given exactly one more mortal lifetime with no subsequent reincarnations. Approximately half choose not to bother with another life on mortal soil, and so are placed within a foetus one second before it is destined to die. The others are reborn in a world to their liking, with a lifespan of their choosing. Keeping their memories is optional, and special supernatural abilities can be bestowed within certain limits. This is Death's boon to her darling agents.

Secondly, there are no regrets between Minions. Partings between mortals are tearful when they harbour guilt not atoned for or deep affections not fully expressed, yet do not know if or when they will reunite. Minions, in their long lives, have ample time to completely articulate their emotions, and to receive closure when their recipients answer.

Finally, if Minions choose to make use of such a resource for farewell parties, the alcohol and pubs in the Realm are to die for. There is an appropriate drink for absolutely everyone. For the quiet ones, there are classy diners like Eden Hall. For the rowdy ones, well, nobody ever walks away from a good bar fight angry.


Lady Death and her Minion Harry Potter sat across from each other at a corner table in the tavern of the World's End inn. A soft buzz of conversation surrounded them, as numerous other customers told tales and made deals. Death had a glass of aged Amrita, and Harry, a tankard of Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Like old friends, they chatted about everything and nothing - about the scratched Galleon, the last Calvinball tournament, the possible futures of Harry's world, Death's worry over her stubborn brother Dream…

Hours later, Harry dozed off. As a wistful smile graced the pale Lady's face, she raised her right hand, touched her thumb to her index finger, and flicked her wrist down. An ethereal panel flashed into being, reminiscent of a computer's context menu. With confident motions, she brought up an array of screens and pruned the Minion's soul and memories to mortal standards, before ejecting the Babel fish and giving him Remnant's dominant language.

The overarching theme for Harry's chosen death was simple enough to understand. He had been manipulated to suffocating levels as a mortal, and necessarily manipulated many events as a Minion. He now wanted a mostly passive spectator role, away from the limelight, but wished to indulge in his love for learning and teaching.

With a final caress of Harry's messy hair, Death banished him from her Realm, never to return. She brought forth a papyrus scroll and re-read it, although she already knew every word of it, carefully etched by Harry's own hand:

…I wish to retain the memories of my first lifetime, from childhood until the moment I stepped through the Veil.

I wish to retain no memories of my service. This, I emphasize, is not out of spite or regret, because Death my Eldest Mother, Eldest Sister and Eldest Friend has been my beacon and harbour, because Marvin my Guide has been an excellent companion despite and because of his moods, because the Realm and its peoples have treated me well.

My Lady willing, I ask to only know with certainty that I served her and did so to her liking, and I ask to remember her image, insofar as a mortal can understand her Endless beauty.

I request to retain the ability to possess living beings. I wish to wander for one dozen years the planet which once birthed me, to learn it as one would learn the back story of a new game, before being anchored to a human host. Destiny the Eldest of All willing, I request that this host's mortal time be helped and not hurt by my presence. I will sleep the Last Sleep when this soul dies, one mortal lifetime later. These conditions, I wish to remember…

Chapter 4 End