Hello again!
(Sorry, it's a bit late, and a lot shorter than I anticipated, but I just couldn't get the chapter to be any longer...)
P.S: HOLY GUACAMOLE GUMBALLS YOU GUYS! THANK YOU for all of the Favs, Alerts, Views and Reviews! I am GOBSMACKED (in case you haven't noticed...)
In any case, ON WITH THE CHAPTER!
Newly Found Hope, Newly Found Family
Chapter 1: Meeting Death
Well . . . Harry thought to himself as he looked around at dark, misty cave that he'd found himself in, this is definitely not Kings Cross Station. . . .
"So then, where am I?" he asked aloud. He was hardly expecting a response, so he didn't feel too embarrassed when he jumped a foot in the air and squeaked when someone answered his rhetorical question.
"You're in Limbo, Magic-Man." Came a woman's voice, "Or you could call it Judgement, or The Gateway, The Fork In The Road, etc. etc. so on and so forth."
"Who are you?"
"The name's Hela Lokidöttir," the woman replied as she stepped out from behind a stalagmite. Harry blinked; she was young, or at least looked the part, with black hair hanging down to the middle of her back in messy curls, a thin face with high cheekbones and a daintily pointed chin. Her skin was pale, contrasting sharply with the black cloak that she wore over a silk dress that was a dark green with gold trim. What caught Harry off guard however, was the fact that the left half of her face and neck was blue. Her eyes were bi-colored as well; her right an impossible shade of midnight blue, her left a glowing red that reminded him eerily of Voldemort. But while his had shone with madness, hers shone with knowing amusement which almost made him want to shift his feet like a guilty child. She stuck out her left hand for a handshake, catching him off guard once again at such a common, everyday gesture in such an uncommon, not-everyday place. Harry noticed, quite belatedly, that her hand was blue as well.
"Harry Potter" he said, shaking her offered hand,
"I know," she said with a smirk, "You're my Master after all."
Harry's eyes practically fell out of his head as his hand dropped limply to his side. "Death?"
"In the flesh . . . in a manner of speaking," she added with a shrug.
"But I thought Death was, uh . . ."
"A guy?" she supplied with a casually raised eyebrow
"Uh, well— . . . yeah, basically." He mumbled, quite pathetically in his opinion.
"Eh, that's probably because when I was younger I used to go around scaring the wits out of the Midguardians—that's you guys—by looking like this." Without further ado, Hela's face rippled like water, colors and shapes warping and changing, before settling and revealing a skeleton in her place. When Harry simply stared, she sighed, Harry watching in somewhat morbid fascination as the skeleton somehow managed to roll its non-existent eyes. "It's me, you troll-brain." The skeleton rippled and warped again before Hela reappeared. "I can shapeshift, kind of like that Tonks woman that you knew, except I can also shift into animals as well."
"Oh"
"'Oh'?" Hela's eyebrow raised once more as she folded her arms across her chest. "Usually I get a bit more of a reaction than just 'oh', I'm almost disappointed."
"What kind of reaction do you usually get?" Harry asked
"Fainting, screaming, crying, laughing hysterically, and occasionally a never-ending constant stream of questions. To be honest with you, the Great Merlin was a chatterbox."
Harry felt his eyes try to escape their sockets for the second time in what had to be less than ten minutes.
"And he had big ears . . ."
"Seriously?" Cue skeptically raised eyebrow
"Yes." Hela was getting impatient, so Harry decided it was high time for him to bite his tongue. Bad things happen to people who piss off Death after all. . . . "As I was saying before we got off track," She said, "You are here, in Limbo, or whatever you want to call it, because you took the completely stupid, yet completely understandable option of suicide. Before you ask, the actual reason why you're here and not already in the afterlife with the rest of your friends and family is because believe it or not, Heimdall—he's a God—took pity on you and decided that you deserve another chance."
"Another— but I don't— Wait, God?!—What—" Harry struggled to make a coherent sentence after Hela not-so-gently dropped that bombshell on him.
"While my powers do include something that could be considered time travel," Hela continued as if her Master wasn't spluttering like a fish out of water, "it's limited to the time of death of important people to you, possibly slightly before if I push it. That, and I can only take your soul back. Now, considering when you could land, I think you'd like to save as many people as you possibly can, so that means going back to the somewhat proverbial beginning."
"What do you mean?"
"You'll be going back to Halloween 1981, in three, two—"
"No, wait—"
"—one."
Harry Potter's world once again went black.
...I feel so evil...
BTW, in case any of you are wondering, my description of Hela is taken from Hathanhate's Super Awesome Epic-length Fic Teeth, which is also a HPxAvengers fic.