A discordant note
Harry turned slowly on himself, grateful for the clothes that had appeared at his need, and let his eyes roam freely in the white, misty expanse of... nothingness.
He wasn't cold, he wasn't hot, the air wasn't stale, but he couldn't feel a breeze on his skin. He simply... was: he breathed, and he looked, observing the white nothingness invent itself before his eyes. He stood in a vast open space, a uniform brightness seemed to suffuse the very air, and as he moved, the translucent, dry mist rolled silently at the height of his knees. The place he was in felt somewhat like the Great Hall, even if it was obviously bigger, and on a scale that defied reason.
In the silence of his surroundings, in the quiet absence of what could be ironically be defined as a 'white-noise', Harry realized that he could hear a slow rustle, a distant creaking of wood that sounded almost musical to his senses. That made him think of a canopy instead of a ceiling when he lifted his gaze upwards, even if there was nothing to see in the white emptiness. The young wizard frowned slightly: he felt like there should have been trees in there, but he couldn't pinpoint the origin of that thought. Not trees, a singular one.
He shook his head slightly, discarding that odd thought, only to return to observe his surroundings: he was alone, except for... something. When his eyes landed on the other being sharing that strange space, Harry recoiled in disgust.
A heavy frown appeared on his brow as he spotted a small, naked, and malformed child: it was all protruding bones and croaking, wet despair. A grimace took the place of the quiet wonder that had kept Harry from speaking out loud as his ears started to take in the pained gurgles of the misshapen creature, and he took a hesitant step in its direction.
He didn't want to approach the malformed baby, or whatever that thing was, and he almost hesitated: the child was curled on himself, its skin rough, looking almost flayed, and now that Harry approached, he could see that the being was shivering under something that could have resembled a stone bench. Out of sight, cast aside, as if it was a shameful secret. Something to be kept hidden, something that wouldn't be mentioned in a polite conversation.
He was repulsed, but still, he moved towards it.
"You cannot help him." a familiar, wise voice called Harry's attention towards the smiling form of Albus Dumbledore, who was walking towards him with open arms, both hands hale and healthy.
Harry's frown deepened even while he felt the instinct to smile at his elder: "Can't I?"
Maybe it was the natural contrary nature of the younger wizard that pushed him to make that question, maybe a part of him was simply tired of listening to everything Dumbledore had to say, considering that his plan spanned the whole length of Harry's life with the only endgame of having Voldemort kill him, or maybe it was something else still.
Hesitation appeared on Albus' features then, his blue eyes blinking in surprise at the sarcastic remark he had just received, but still, the Chosen One stopped his advance towards the malformed child, focusing his emerald gaze towards his dead headmaster.
"Harry, you wonderful boy, you brave, brave man! Walk with me." the smile on Dumbledore's face was serene in a way that would have been impossible to see while he was alive, and that thought brought the last Potter back on track where the mere visage of the man didn't succeed in doing so.
"Professor..." hesitantly, but with the familiarity born of a trust cultivated throughout the years -a cracked trust, but trust nonetheless- and a faint smile of his own, Harry followed the dead Headmaster until they reached another stone-like bench, "You're... you're dead."
"Quite." Dumbledore sat with a satisfied huff, and he waited patiently for the much younger wizard to elaborate on the implications.
With another glance at the misshapen, but now thankfully quiet, child, Harry joined his elder: "But that means... that I'm dead too?"
"Ah," the headmaster let out a gutsily sigh, "That's the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not."
It would have been too much to ask for Dumbledore to explain himself clearly now that he was dead, wouldn't it? Still, Harry focused on the main issue: "So I am alive?"
"Well, I wouldn't know about that."
"But, but... I should have died!" a distressed note entered the voice of the now even more confused wizard while he brought his hands into his messy hair, "I didn't defend myself, I wanted to die!"
"And that, I think, made all the difference." happiness and deep satisfaction radiated from Dumbledore as if he was a bonfire, and despite himself, Harry found himself smiling in turn.
Once more, Harry thought he heard the rustle of distant leaves, and maybe the groaning of an immense branch of wood following a wind he couldn't perceive. He stared at the empty ceiling, at the infinite, bright whiteness that characterized everything in that odd place, and he found himself folding his hands in his lap.
"I let him kill me." he resumed, exchanging a glance with Dumbledore before staring once more towards the absentee sky, and after a kind nudge from the dead headmaster, he went on: "The killing curse struck me, and... the piece of Voldemort's soul that was in me is... gone?"
"Oh yes!" Dumbledore almost giggled, his happiness deep and resonating in the air, "The Killing Curse separates a soul from the body, but only one!"
The emerald green gaze of Harry landed once more on the misshapen, desperate figure of the child hidden under another stone-like bench: "But that means..."
"That is something beyond either of our help." the headmaster repeated, with some undefined quality to his tone, his blue eyes twinkling less than when he had first appeared.
Was it odd, that of all the thoughts Harry's mind could summon, the words of the very same wizard sitting by his side were the ones to ring louder than any other? We'll soon have to choose between what's right, and what is easy.
Dumbledore had been the one to make that distinction, back when the world seemed dimmer, and danger started to loom over the horizon in a way that had made the sun feel just a bit colder.
The Chosen One rose from his seat with a frown born of confusion and determination on his brow: in a couple of strides, he was kneeling at the side of the misshapen child, and a soft cloth appeared out of nowhere in answer to his need. Softly, slowly, carefully, the young wizard wrapped the flayed form of what was left of Voldemort in that cloth, and once he felt steady, he sat with the creature held in his arms.
"Harry." Dumbledore insisted gently, this time a note of what could almost be recognized as censure present in his voice, but the wizard in question cast aside the part of his head that told him to simply listen to Dumbledore. It would have been the easy thing to do, after so many years in which following Dumbledore's lead had been the only unwaveringly right option for so many.
As Harry observed the broken child in his arms, he could only think, oddly enough, of Aunt Petunia, and of the repulsion and disgust for him that she had made him feel every day of his life.
The broken creature he held shivered in the soft cloth that had been wrapped around it, and it opened by a fraction what could pass for eyes: a slated pupil in a dull, almost oozing red. These were not the same eyes of the Voldemort in the forest, and Harry knew exactly what he was holding, there was no denying it: he knew it with every fiber of his being.
"Harry, that is..."
"I know who this is." Harry felt acutely everything that he had gone through because of Voldemort, the gaping absence of loving parents, an unhappy childhood, schooling that had threatened his life with almost mathematical precision, and the first year of his adulthood spent shivering in fear, hunger, and in growing hopelessness. The wizard knew his own rage, the fury that had taken a concrete shape after the death of Sirius, when Dumbledore finally explained the prophecy. And yet, now that he gazed upon what that Voldemort had made of himself, he could only feel a great pity.
Rage was an exhausting emotion, and too often that had been the only thing to push Harry forward. There was nothing that he could do to save the child, the wizard knew that in the same way he knew what the child actually was, and the Chosen One didn't want to outright help that malformed creature, simply, his own rage, the distant temptation of rubbing metaphorical salt into that being's wounds, the action of ignoring it... it felt utterly unnecessary.
"Some say that mercy upon the guilty is a crime towards the innocents." Dumbledore's voice rang again from where he had sat originally, and Harry couldn't help but frown heavily in his direction. Something in his gut told him that there was something wrong going on.
Still, he returned his attention to the pitiful shape in his arms, to the unseeing, wandering red eyes of the creature, to the jerking movements that the soft cloth managed to contain. "It's not up to me to deliver mercy, or punishment." the words that slipped by his lips had the same distant quality of the invisible rustle of leaves, the same overbearing certainty of the impossibly vast groaning trunk that Harry felt had to be somewhere nearby, he was sure of what he had just said, just not of the origin of that thought.
"But his suffering means nothing to those he hurt, it won't help them find peace, either." the Gryffindor wizard shook his head while his emerald green gaze roamed over the helpless form in his arms, "This one can't harm anyone else, and that is enough."
When the red eyes of the creature met Harry's, the latter could almost feel the agonizing pain, the shuddering broken-ness of the being in his arms, and with no further hesitation, he gently stroked the creature's forehead, hoping to calm it somehow: "Shhh."
With one last shivering motion, the being in the wizard's arms vanished into ashes, and then those too disappeared into nothingness. After a second in which Harry stared dumbfounded at the empty blanket in his hands, he looked at Dumbledore's flabbergasted expression and gave him a crooked smile of his own.
It is done. A humongous weight was lifted from Harry's shoulder then, and he felt like he could for the first time stand tall, utterly separated from the tangled mess that the prophecy had wrought.
With a start, Harry found that they were both weeping, and the headmaster removed his half-moon spectacles, his hand temporarily hiding his face: "You're a good man, Harry Potter. You gave to that creature far more than it deserved."
Harry stared once more at the empty blanket in his hands, and he felt, more than heard, the odd groaning of wood in the distance, accompanied by the increasingly familiar soft rustling of countless leaves.
"I have struggled with compassion, Harry." Dumbledore's voice barely managed to distract the younger wizard from the not-there tree that he kept hearing, "In life, I had to hold everyone at a distance, in order to be able to direct them to the best of my abilities, and wisdom prevents bravery... it was necessary..."
At the confused expression of the Chosen One, almost feeling on his skin his curiosity at the apparent non-sequitur, another smile appeared on the dead headmaster's face, and it looked almost self-deprecating: "Bravery is the purest expression of will, the decision to disregard risk and pain in the pursuit of a goal."
Dumbledore shook his head, disregarding that topic, and he stared at the much younger wizard with a soft glow coming from his left eye: "But now it's not the time to unpack the complexities of my character, Harry, no, I have kept you long enough... instead, you have a decision to make."
"A decision?" the previously disregarded gut feeling that nagged Harry returned with a thunderous presence then, and the Chosen One frowned again. Dumbledore had always been impossible to read, impossible to predict, his brain ran at a completely different speed, and he had always plans within plans, but there were a few inconsistencies too many this time. No, it's about his character...
Dumbledore wouldn't have tried to stop Harry from comforting that misshapen creature, he would also have likely apologized for the necessary deceit in planning for the younger wizard's death... the young wizard's instinct, something that had been honed since his very first year at Hogwarts, stirred fully, and pointed unerringly at the dead headmaster.
"You can choose, I think, between going on," the headmaster peered at him from above his half-moon spectacles, his left eye almost glowing instead of the more familiar twinkling, "or turning back."
"How would I do either?" Harry's attention focused fully on the subtly glowing left eye of his headmaster, and his unconscious mind kept hammering on the amassed inconsistencies. Strangely enough, it felt like Dumbledore was the one who didn't belong into the all-white replica of a insanely vast King's Cross in which they were both standing, something about his presence didn't sing in tune with the distant music created by the there-but-not immense tree.
"It depends, I think..." the dead headmaster's voice brought Harry's attention back on track, "Where would you say we are?"
"Something like King's Cross, I think."
"How apt." an uncharacteristic grin blossomed for an instant on the headmaster's face then, "Then, I suppose, you'd just need to catch a train."
"Voldemort's got the Elder Wand." Harry forced himself to focus on what truly mattered: his friends were back among the living, and his nemesis hadn't yet been vanquished, not fully, not forever. The oddities and the strange feeling the Dumbledore gave off were discarded. Ron, Hermione, Ginny, countless others, people that he didn't even know: too many were still at risk.
He made his choice.
AN
I had always known that getting started with Marvel fics would bring me to ruin...
Since I've managed to swallow my distaste for the vast differences between actual mythology and Marvel's representation of the Norse gods (more from the comics than from the MCU, as you'll have noticed by now), I kept finding interesting fics (or outright spectacular as in 'Ensoulment'), and as a side effect, I kept getting ideas. And I recently got my first taste for well-written actual crossovers.
In particular, a PM got me wondering about the possibilities of some main characters (I usually ill tolerate those because a dumb protagonist and 'the power of friendship' aren't my cup of tea), and given that every modification I have to bring to a canon lore (I dislike outright rewriting those, it feels like I'm missing the point of fanfiction entirely) can be explained with an AU...
Well, crossovers present many possibilities, given of course some flexibility on both my ( the author's) and your (the readers') part: some stories write themselves, and I need only to touch up some lore in order to bring together the fandoms in a more or less acceptable way (it's difficult to have one fandom not devour the other, both because of the imbalance of the respective power-levels of the characters, and because of the sheer exposure needed to not make a mess of a relatively simple plot).
Following my decision and revelations about the plot of 'Thor: God of Death', my brain got utterly stuck on this particular plot-bunny. You'll see what I mean soon enough, but in particular, I wanted to try an actual merge of Marvel's reality with the Harry Potter's one: I have seen it done in many other fics (as in: both Marvel and HP-verse share the same world, not casual world-hopping on either part), but I have found far too few stories in which the mere 'history' of the two worlds has ever been properly intertwined.
The main self-imposed challenge behind this fic is to see if I can actually set up a single organic reality that contains both Marvel and Harry Potter, and to facilitate that I decided to more or less adopt/steal/mix-and-serve a few drabbles or one-shots that I've seen in the past years (among them 'King's Cross', 'Not Dumbledore', and 'Hermione Granger: Agent of SHIELD'). Of course, while the ideas are hardly novel ones, in those fics I found unique elements that had been exceptionally well written, and I'll use them as a starting point for this fic.
I'll also keep the respective timelines: '97 for the Battle of Hogwarts, and 2008 for the beginning of Iron Man, this allows me a decade to 'set the tone', so to speak, for the characters from the HP-verse that I'll exploit the most.
Since I really want to have a starting point that is both organic and more or less without plot-holes, there will be extensive development of the characters in the first part, which are of course the element that I'll leverage to knit together Marvel and HP-verse.
Let me know what you think of this idea, keeping in mind that it'll take a few chapters to properly get the ball rolling.
But since I've already mentioned mythology and the Marvelverse, I'd say that you all should already know who 'Dumbledore' was.
Anyway, let me know what you think of this!