A/N: Gah! That last chapter got me right in my tender feels! I hope all of you enjoyed it as well and if you did please leave a review and tell me about it! Also feel free to follow me here on FFN or AO3 because I have more HP/Diablo coming in the future!

Disclaimer: Nope.

Also this chapter goes to the guest reviewer Pk, for their awesome reviews that keep this author uplifted. :)

Chapter Eleven...The Things We Do

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."- A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

The seizure had dulled into a series of fine tremors when the soulstone was at last engulfed in my own natural natural magic to encase it. The relief came, only to be replaced with a new and startling agony of its own. Jutting out in front of my face where my Angel held me in his arms, was the blade of a longsword. Shining blood like molten sunshine slid thickly down its tip, smearing and dripping onto my front. A fat drop of the precious substance rolled heavily down my face. Suna's sword...piercing through Malthael's body.

The Aspect of Death was still upright somehow though the strength of will it must have taken must have been unbearable. His pain echoed through him to me, that one contact of shining blood sparking a small, already fading connection between Master and Death.

There was no time to cry out. There was no spare moment.

The instant Malthael saw me open my bloody eyes at last, reassured himself that I was going to make it through, he let go of the agonizing struggle that it took to just hold on to life. He died, still holding me in my arms.

In that single moment, feeling his body go still beneath my own, I hated Suna. I hated her with the rage of all of the fires in the Burning Hells. Suddenly, trapped in the midst of my own horror, grief and fury, I understood. I understood what drove my love to such atrocities.

I had stopped him from using the soulstone! I had taken it from him! There was no need to kill him anymore! But in her eyes, the deaths that he had caused were too great, his sins too vast. Balance and the dead demanded retribution. She had seen the dark deed done. Malthael's body spasmed without warning, caught in its last death throws. If it hadn't been for the witchdoctor that I had just been cursing on the inside, I likely would have been torn to pieces by the sudden onslaught of bright, furious streams of light pouring from his body.

The souls were being freed. Every one. All of the souls that he had taken in, had consumed to boost his own power, were released in a single instant. The death magic holding them within Pandemonium flared and then died, leaving the dead no longer shackled to the land of the living. It would have been beautiful in another time. It would have been uplifting to see all of those souls freed at last if it weren't my beloved's body they were tearing apart with their escape. Now, desperately reaching out for my Angel, tears and blood spilling down my face, I selfishly wished that they would stay. At least let me have something left to say goodbye to…

It was no gentle end, no easy giving up of the ghosts. No, in death, Malthael was losing his Aspect-hood. He was changing in the span of only a second or two. His wings which had drooped in his demise, flared with the streaming brightness that they had been before his change to the Aspect of Death. The souls escape in an explosion of light, the blast shaking the very stones underfoot, yet in the midst of it all, something was happening to my love's body. The darkness that had surrounded him for as long as I had known the Angel fell away in a burst of light and shock overtook the pain that wracked my body and heart.

Malthael, in his death, had been absolved.

It didn't stop the pain of his loss from hurting any less. It didn't change that the Angel I loved was gone now from me forever.

"Harry." It was Suna, kneeling down beside me from where she had dragged me away from the inevitable explosion of souls. I didn't want to face her. Not yet. Not right now. Her hand pointed out towards the brightness though and her words stuttered my heart all over again. "Malthael...is there."

He was there? How could that be? But she was right. In a way, at least.

There, flickering weakly like a small, sputtering candle flame was the Angel's soul.

Malthael's victims had all been freed only to leave his own fading essence behind, still tied to my own in death.

I crawled through the shining blood and ash leftover from the destruction of his body, hands slicing open on the broken shards of his armor, to cradle my hands around the tiny glowing orb. Nothing in Heaven, Earth or the Burning Hells could have described the bitterness that filled my spirit then, the sorrow as I sobbed broken tears over my love's lost soul. That was how Tyrael found us moments later: Suna standing in silent vigil, her face unreadable save for the tiniest ray of guilt in her cocoa eyes and me, huddling over the dying ray of his brother's essence, crying my pain to the skies.

What must he have thought when he saw me there? Covered in ash and blood that was both my own and Malthael's, the Black Soulstone embedded safely in my chest and cradling that tiny glowing flicker close. We must have made quite the sight.

My Angel's soul gave a shudder between my hands and slowly began to dim. His soul was beginning to extinguish…

No! He couldn't leave me here alone!

What would my life be without him in it? I didn't remember how to live without him now! Tyrael's words echoed back at my cruelly, his uncertainty of what would happen to Malthael once he died a terror that seeped into my every pore.

What could be done though? A soul needed a body to stabilize itself to, otherwise they would cross over and for Malthael that meant…

Destruction. Final and complete.

All hope was lost. There simply was no body in which to place his soul.

"I can't do this without you…" I whispered brokenly to him, the illumination of his spirit growing more dim by the moment, "Please don't leave me. Not like this…"

There was nothing he could do though, no way for him to respond and reassure me. No vast knowledge he could impart with so little strength left to him. I could do nothing.

I tried to bring him closer, to curl my body around him one last time but my hand knocked into the stone sitting over the flesh of my chest like some sort of bizarre, infused chestplate. The soulstone sat within my body, quieting now that its impotence had been demonstrated. My body now housed it so carefully as if I had been made for that purpose from the start.

I shared my body with the stone now.

Shared...my body.

The answer was so obvious that I could have cursed my own stupidity. If I could house the soulstone safely, my enemies' spirits bound there in hate, then surely I could do the same for my beloved, an Angel that I shared an intimate and metaphysical connection with! He was Death and I was his Master.

"Stay with me…Stay with me and I vow that I will never leave your side again. Not for the rest of my life." Please work! Please let this work!

Carefully, with all of the gentleness of a mother with her infant, I eased the flickering spirit into my own body. It was...soft. Smooth in sensation, it reminded me of sunshine shimmering up through warm water. Nothing at all like the forced agony of the soulstone, our union was like that day when we made love at the Pools of Wisdom. It felt natural and right. With a sigh, Malthael found a home there, his soul sending loving caress along the inside of my awareness before I felt him settle in to rest.

With only a part of my awareness left, the other half listing under the weight of exhaustion, I heard Tyrael's soft leather boots approach. He knelt down next to me, brushing my hair away from my blood-streaked face. His eyes were kind and sorrowful within his face but there was a relief there too. All of this destruction and chaos was over though he had lost a brother to its call. My vision began to fade and without preamble, he scooped me up bodily into his arms just as Malthael had done only a handful of hours earlier. The last thing that my slipping mind registered as I fell into unconsciousness was Suna's whispered words in my ear.

"I am sorry, Harry…"

~O~

"Malthael is defeated and Diablo is entrapped. Imperius will insist on you being...detained in the Heavens for the stone's protection but I believe that the soulstone will be safer out of the hands of Angels and Demons."

Suna nodded in agreement, looking up at me from where she was rubbing a soothing salve into the cuts on my hands. Her own palms were calloused and rough from weapons-use but they were gentle on my own regardless. I could read her regret in every touch and look the witchdoctor leveled me with. Painfully, the acceptance came that she had only been doing what she thought was right. I could no more fault her for that than she could fault me for grieving the Angel who tried to murder her.

"What will you do now?"

What would we do? Somehow, wandering the Void for all of eternity didn't seem entirely appealing even with Malthael safely enshrouded in the back of my mind, a cool and loving presence. Neither did remaining here with Tyrael and his Horadrim. This wasn't where we belonged. Not now. Maybe not ever. But...I wanted to stop this from happening again, to make sure the Conflict remained a ceasefire and there was one place that my heart kept returning to, no matter what. The very place that I had been brought into this world in the first place. It would be there where we could do the most good and still be together in this strange symbiosis of ours.

"Malthael will not fade now that he is connected to me but after everything he's done, I wouldn't have him here on Sanctuary. We will return to Pandemonium and guard the realms there, stop any demons or errant sorcerers from crossing over where they don't belong."

Yes. That was far better a mission than floating through the deep darkness for the rest of time. Malthael and I together in the only way we could be now. The new Aspect of Wisdom nodded slowly in understanding, begrudgingly, but after a moment, his eyes alighted with a newfound energy.

"Actually...I have a better idea."

~O~

Tyrael's direction, peculiarly enough, found us in the High Heavens standing before the crux of the Heavens themselves.

The Crystal Arch.

The seat of Heaven's power and the place from where Angels were born.

And reborn.

"We must be quick, Harry. Before Imperius arrives." The Archangel explained in a rush, "I fear that he may try to stop this."

His reasonings were beyond my understanding but I would not argue with them. Not if it meant Malthael returning to me at some point in the future.

"He will be reborn?"

My question was tentative, uncertain. Now that we were here, I was afraid. Afraid of letting him go and losing him forever. My hands trembled around his luminous spirit, the warmth emanating from it stronger than before but still weak, still low. What if I did this thing and he was never reborn? What if this was it for us? Fear sat heavy and solid in my chest and coiled in my belly like a nest of snakes and something else. A strange sensation that I could no more name than I could become a tree. A pulling of sorts at my soul itself.

"I am certain of it." My companion nodded decisively, "It...may take some time though. Rarely do these things happen immediately. Malthael may not be reborn for months, years...centuries. Are you prepared to wait that long for him to return?"

There was no questioning it. Feeling as though my heart was bleeding itself dry with every beat, my hands opened and slowly eased my love's soul into the stone of the archway. Malthael disappeared into the marble and silver as if he had never been in the first place and I was left alone with that peculiar gnawing at my spirit.

"Always." Came my whispered promise, remembering the vow that had been made back in Pandemonium.

Suddenly and without warning, there was a tug, a hot pull on the essence of my very being. My vision burst into white light and vaguely, I could hear my companion calling my name, feel his hands on my shoulders shaking me but only light filled my vision. Unlike when I had taken in the Black Soulstone, this heat wasn't pain. It was…

Hope. Warmth. Love.

And inside, I was shifting.

My soul itself was changing to fit some new mould that I couldn't begin to fathom. The edges of my vision began to clear and the shifting slowed and then stopped. It occurred to me very quickly that the cause of the light hadn't been my eyes, it was largely in part due to the massive ball of white lightning that had filled the space between the arch. Behind us, I could hear Imperius shouting to his men and Tyrael. I hadn't even realized that he had arrived.

The lightning orb began to shrink smaller and smaller, from a meter across to a few feet and then at last to a foot. Inside, one could start to make out the shape of some black object floating in the center.

"Harry." Tyrael called out to me, his voice more clear and calm than I had ever heard it, "Reach out and take them."

Them?

Sure enough, when my eyes could at last make out the objects, timidly I did as I was bid. The handles were warm in my palms as if they had been lying in the sun but they were as familiar to me as they had been when last I had seen my beloved wield them.

Malthael's sickles.

The sight of them made something hollow inside of myself echo out in pain. As long as I had known him, the Angel of Death had never been without his faithful scythes, Ar'mortis. When Malthael had fallen, I hadn't even thought to look for them before we left Pandemonium. Realizing that, guilt seeped into that empty cavern in my heart to fill in the spaces alongside the grief.

Imperius, I could see when my gaze swivelled back to the Angels, was practically vibrating with suppressed fury. At his side Auriel and an annoyingly smug Ithereal stood in witness to the event. The Aspect of Hope at least appeared pleased at the happenings.

"Happy new beginnings to you, brother." She declared brightly, her aura sparkling in delight.

"Brother?" Did I sound as much like an idiot as I felt?

Wisdom's smile was bright and welcoming, "Indeed! It seems as though the Crystal Arch has chosen its new Aspect of Death."

When the confusion didn't clear for me right away Ithereal approached me gently, laying a hand on my shoulder and permeating my awareness with a sense of calm.

"Death became an Aspect when the arch instigated the change in Malthael. Now, that position must be filled just as Wisdom needed to be when my brother abandoned it. Soon, a new Justice will be chosen to take Tyrael's place. Who better to take the position than yourself? Who better to understand the tenuous cycle of life and death and the sanctity of both than the Master of Death himself? You are now the second mortal Archangel, Harry. As I told you, I always knew that you were destined for great things." He explained softly. His being took on an amused air quickly and Ithereal finished off his explanation with a simple, "You were always meant to be exactly where you are."