A/N: Look, I had to make up for that history making, back-to-back update of the previous chapter by taking eleven months to finish this one. Balance, baby. Balance.
Also, fun fact, St. Joseph's Cathedral is pretty much an exact replica of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, down to the underground crypts and their entrance.
There had been a time when Death believed that there could be no greater insult than the theft of their Heart. Stolen by one most trusted, it wasn't a slight that had been forgotten or forgiven; all who'd been involved in its taking had faced the harshest of justices.
But then the fractured pieces of their Heart had been gathered, mended, made whole by a slip of a boy who inspired no confidence, and Death found new meaning to the word insult.
When they looked upon the soul their Heart had anchored itself to, they saw nothing to justify its decision (because it had, in fact, been a decision. Their Heart was adamant that he was the one). A childe of fortune, the little bacterium had spent his pitifully short existence coasting on the winds of luck with no real input or effort on his part. And through that same luck he had managed to seduce their Heart of which they were totally undeserving.
Death wasn't blind, they saw the sheen of bravery that burnished his soul, and those winding roots of stubbornness that made even them pause, but at his core this boy was weak. Dependent on ideologies that had only served to cause him suffering in the past. Dependent on souls who cared nothing for his well-being once it got in the way of their own. Dependent on memories of people long passed, and beliefs of what (he) should be.
It was because of these dependencies that the boy was so unmoored when ripped from his home and left in a time where he had nothing, and why he'd been so reliant on mortals to find his answers. Why he'd been allowed to be chained, because in no other universe should that be possible.
Anchored to the boy's soul was the Heart of the Universe. Fragments, yes, mere slivers of what she'd once been, but still so unspeakably powerful no creature should be capable of taming, let alone containing it. But the mortals did, with their ring of metal and lightning and no problem. No fight. Because the fool of a quark had spent so long rejecting what the Heart offered, he'd left himself weak, and left the Heart, still in need of nourishment after millennia spent unbound, weak.
The sham of a union between their Heart and the boy took the place as Greatest Insult and Death could only lament such a waste. The Heart, imbued with that bit of Death themself had been meant for incredible things, the start of an era the likes of which had never been seen and now it belonged to the quark. No matter how ill-suited they might be, the Heart had made its choice, and once begun this was not a process so easily (or ever) reversed.
Then came the day in the forest.
The boy had begged for their blade, and for just a moment they considered granting him the wish, if only to try. With the both of them so eager to see him passed on, maybe it would work? But Death kept to their senses, denied the quark his quick end, and the wrath the boy's untarnished soul summoned tugged on something within them. Literally. Death felt their own power respond to the fury of the Heart's host, feeding it until nothing remained alive around them.
Death realized then that the power of their Heart had not been wasted, simply contained in a new vessel. One that, if groomed just right, might have a few advantages of its own. But first they needed him free of these mortals, and the only one able to do that was the quark himself. So, Death secured that promise in the forest of rot and ushered the quark to face the first of his trials.
In the days of his reconditioning the boy called for Death, stuck in an endless cycle of dark and pain and dark, Death was always on his mind. His agony and exhaustion crept through their bond until some days his voice was all they could hear over the din of souls ready to depart.
Being near helped. As weak as he was, the quark could not sense their presence, but he quieted just the same when Death was around. So, they stuck close, forced to witness the horror they'd been content to allow the boy to suffer alone. And as they watched the deluge of degradation that still wasn't enough to break him, they had to take a moment to reconsider what weak meant when it came to one Harry Potter.
They'd thought the boy a leaf among the rapids. Flimsy and so very easily swept along by forces much greater, but through sheer luck was somehow able to find its way to the banks mostly hail and whole. But perhaps he was more like the boulder instead. Planted in the center of the current, being shaven down on all sides from its sheer force, but still unmoved. Trapped by circumstance but he refused to be bowled over and swept up in any direction, he stood fast and when the beds ran dry, he would remain the last one standing.
And maybe, finally, Death was beginning to see what had drawn the Heart to this little bacterium from the start. They could see in him the potential.
This was his unmaking.
At a level deeper than marrow, past organ and bone, Harry was being unmade. It wasn't a result of the Heart, which he could feel now, separate from his own magic, burning like a totem in a space behind his ribs he didn't even think existed. No, this undoing was of a different sort.
He'd only been fifteen when the mantle of hero was forced on him. Sure, in the years before he'd acted the part, gotten into adventures that certainly felt heroic. But it was that dawn in the headmaster's office, just hours after losing Sirius, that the true weight of what was expected of him finally fell onto his malnourished shoulders.
He was The Hero, the one to save the day no matter what it took. He would sacrifice his family, his sanity, his body, his being, anything that was required so that the rest could live on their untarnished lives. This was his predestined role. There'd never been a choice, no question, it was simply what was, and he'd accepted that with the little grace he was allowed.
He'd borne the weight the very best he could. Even in those cold, muddy forests when he felt like he had so few friends left and no allies within reach, he hadn't given it up. When, just a week free of Voldemort, the wizarding world was facing yet another world ending threat, he'd taken it on as his own personal responsibility to save them. And even after they'd chased him to the ends of the timeline, dragged him back bleeding, and violated him on the deepest level, he still felt he had to warn them from the dangers of their chosen path, tried to play the hero even bound and disgraced to save them from themselves.
And it had gotten him…where?
Ellis' corpse cast a long shadow over the room, seventeen hundred muggles were arranged at his feet, bodies frozen stiff but faces twisted in horrible tableaus of terror, shock, rage, and outside he could hear the world ending.
This was meant to be another act of heroism, sacrificing these lives and the last of his morals to finally free the Heart from Strucker's unwitting captivity. And it was worth it, he still stood by that, but where did it end? At what point did he say that this was too far, too much, no matter the lives that might be saved from it? Or was there no line to draw? Would he carry on justifying every foul deed with placations of the greater good? How long before he looked at himself and saw the Dark Lord? The Headmaster?
Looking over the room and the carnage they'd wrought, Harry thought he might be asking the question just a little too late.
The realization didn't scare him the way it should have, because finally he was starting to get it. Dumbledore was no hero, Voldemort most certainly wasn't, and this was by choice. Both men had the capacity to be heroic, even had heroic moments in their own rights, but they'd known what it would mean to take on such a role full time, they'd weighed the worth of it and found it to be lacking. Why not allow naïve little Harry to bear the burden while they took on their own roles? Ones in which they had the choice to be selfish, had the freedom to mess up.
They'd had the right of it after all, this job of being the hero was just no good. Sometimes the lives of strangers weren't worth the suffering.
And there is where the unmaking began. Because he was so tired of being the one to make the sacrifices. He was tired of putting everyone's needs before his own.
He didn't want to be the hero anymore.
It felt blasphemous just to think. Fundamentally wrong the moment he decided on it, and maybe destiny (or whatever asshole assigned these sort of things) agreed because the moment- the very moment- he entertained the idea of just giving up all the propaganda he'd been forced to believe, a roar shook the foundation of the building.
It was a sound that had no place somewhere like New York, that was the guttural roar of a beast of wide planes, endless space, not the narrow ways and stacked buildings of the city.
The out of place sound was almost immediately followed by something powerful colliding with the wall, right where the door used to be. Loose bits of dust and dirt rained from the shaken wall, and Harry had half a moment to be concerned before the wall crumbled and something exploded into the church.
Green, was the first thing his mind processed, mottled green skin, stretched over meters of dangerous, unnatural muscles. It stood upright like a mountain troll, it had the same lumbering posture and heavy, Neanderthal brow, but its pale green eyes held an intelligence no troll could match. They took no time narrowing on the group of mages so conveniently arranged at the top of the hall, and then it began sprinting right for them at a speed that made even Walden fall back a step.
Powerful legs ate the space between meters in great strides, covering the distance of the center row with ease.
"What the shit?" Crane sounded like he wanted to cry as he watched the creature hurtle at them, but Harry had faced actual trolls before, ones with clubs as big as him, he wouldn't let the initial shock of this thing's appearance, his speed, or his general greenness steal his nerve.
He tried cursing it as it came, first the few milder jinxes and hexes he'd learned at Hogwarts, then he dipped into his well of knowledge from Magick Moste Evile, just to watch his eviscerating curses bounce off the green hide without breaking its stride even a little.
So, the thing was spell resistant, but a lot of magic creatures were, and if there was one thing Harry had learned in his years of fighting foes bigger, stronger, and just overall more powerful than him, it was that he didn't always need to make his opponent bleed. There was its own kind of honor in distracting an enemy long enough to make a retreat.
Harry abandoned his offensives spells for an easy tripping jinx and was rewarded with the almost comical sight of the green troll getting caught up in its own legs and face planting halfway down the aisle with enough force to dig up stone. Its pride was probably more hurt than anything else of course, a fall like that wasn't enough to deal any real damage, but it bought them just enough time for Harry to order:
"Loose the muggles."
On top of the jolly green giant, there was now a giant hole in the front of the building where anyone- the NYPD, the military, those guys called the Avengers- could climb though and cause them even more problems. But a thousand extra bodies making a mess of the floor ought to make reaching them that much harder.
Now normally, Ivy's influence took time to wear off, the brain needed time to detox the unnatural chemical reaction, but a quick trigger of their adrenal glands got the job done quicker. With the help of his core team's nightmare patroni nipping viciously at ankles, the muggles were tripping from their seats, flooding the aisles, and creating a general mess of things while jolly green was still picking its face up from the crater it had carved.
Harry didn't give the creature the chance to recover, he aimed a single "Glacius" at the ground around its feet, then at least a dozen consecutive "Incarcerous" at its tree trunk legs. The ropes conjured weren't near strong enough to hold against the beast's full rage, but there were so many it would take time tearing through the winding, knotted, snaking mess on its lower half. A task made no easier by the floor frozen solid beneath it.
The beast roared again, the muggles around it toppled over in fright, but Harry watched a full ten seconds pass as it writhed on the floor without making any progress in regaining its footing. "That should hold him a few minutes," he told his mages, "but let's try and be gone by the time he breaks loose, he looks pissed. We're taking Contingency Route A."
Contingency Route A was the first of six (because no one had ever accused HYDRA of doing things halfway) planned backup exits. Through the ambulatory, on the furthest walls were a set of copper doors that opened to a short, steep flight of stairs down. Harry made it three steps in the direction, was just coming up to where the thick, spine of wood was protruding from the floorboards, when Death slid back into his field of view.
The entity said, "Drop."
Harry did, immediately, and still felt the slide of cool metal skim the back of his head. A disc, curved just the slightest bit inward with edges that were wicked sharp, had just missed taking his head clean off and embedded itself into Ellis' skewer.
For just a second Harry marveled at the impossibility of the feat; the spine of wood he'd conjured was as large around as a manhole cover, but the disc had cut nearly a third of the way through.
But then it registered.
The alternating shades of red and blue. The white star in the center. He knew this weapon, this shield. He'd spent however many hours working with it to make sure it deflected all manner of curses.
But how?
He spun back around, already searching for that familiar spot of blue and blonde among the crowd. The floor was still a snarl of bodies too thick to move through, but the pews were empty, and running literally across their backs was the shield's owner.
Seventy years since the day he'd been torn from the man, and Steve looked almost exactly the same. He was missing the iconic suit, the swoop of his hair was a little off, and he wasn't smiling, but the decades between the last time they'd seen each other didn't seem to have touched him one bit.
But he wasn't bounding to greet him, to sweep him up into one of those Hagrid hugs after so long separated. No, this face was grim, determined, all Captain America and none of the Steve Rogers. He didn't see Harry as a friend, he wasn't. He saw only a threat, an enemy to be taken down.
Harry.
Couldn't.
Move.
Because…what the fuck?
Steve was dead. Strucker had confirmed it himself. And, yeah, maybe it was naive to trust the word of his captors, but for all the bad he'd done, Strucker had never lied. And even if just this once he had, nearly a century had passed, and unless the serum had provided the unforeseen side-effect of immortality, there was no way Steve could be here, untouched by time.
The obvious indecision was costing him. Steve was drawing nearer quickly, but for the first time Harry wondered how bad it would actually be if they were caught. This was Steve. His presence negated any argument Harry might have of not being able to trust the entity they turned themselves over to. Because Harry knew him. He trusted him. He'd told Strucker the very first time they met, Steve would die before he let HYDRA flourish, let alone work alongside them. Anywhere Steve took them would be safe.
He wanted to. He really, really did. Because he missed his friend. Any friend really, but Steve especially because Steve had been with Harry those last few moments. It was for Steve that Harry chose not to fight when Robards and his men came to bring him home. He'd given his freedom to keep Steve alive and now he just wanted…
"Boss."
Harry shook himself.
Steve was nearly on him, less than a dozen pews to go, but Harry's team remained at his back. He could feel the tension radiating from them, their uncertainty, but not one of them broke rank. And easy as that, he remembered why turning himself in just wasn't an option.
Steve would die before he let HYDRA flourish. When Harry had spat that at Strucker like a challenge, he'd believed it to be true with everything he had, because it was. But standing here, face hidden, hands red, and standing literally in a pool of blood from the president he'd just slain on live television, how could he claim to be anything but a part of them? Who would believe him?
Maybe Steve would. He was the sort whose loyalty ran deep, but Harry knew nothing else of his situation. Was he still with the SSR? Someone else entirely? Or no one at all? And really, the question had to be asked, how was Steve here? Nearly unchanged after over half a century? How did Harry even know this was really him?
He didn't. And while it wasn't really possible to hand himself over to someone worse than HYDRA, he didn't have only himself to worry about.
He had a plan, a good one, and for once he would have to trust in himself.
"Bombarda."
Three pews before Steve was on them, the entire section exploded, sending wooden debris and Steve Rogers' doppelganger flying back the way he'd came.
As he fell, Harry aimed his wand down at the ground then jerked it upwards in a harsh tug of a motion. This time, when he incanted "Glacius," a veneer of ice didn't coat the floor to trip up his enemies, instead twisted spires of ice erupted from the floor and toward the ceiling, until a fifteen-foot wall of jagged hoarfrost spanned the length of the room. Harry on one side, Steve on the other.
"We need to go. Quickly." He spoke to the mages without turning, but knew they heard and were listening all the same. "Walden, lead the way."
At his back, he heard the shuffle of his team getting a move on, but still he stood facing the wall of ice. And from the other side a face was looking back. Not Steve's, he still hadn't freed himself from his pile of woodchips, and most of the muggles had stampeded their way out of the only exit, but a woman lingered. She was dressed sharp in an all-black pants suit, hair pulled back in a sleek tail save for the two perfect curls framing either side of her face. She was impeccable save for the mess of red gore where her left eye had been. Harry hadn't been the one to kill her, he was sure of it, that was a bullet that had taken her eye. But he could feel the weight of her blame even from here, her dark gaze followed him as he turned his back and made his break for freedom.
In two leaping strides, he was off the dais and through the ambulatory. The copper doors that marked his way out were conveniently blocked from sight by the spine of wood protruding from the stage, to any still watching it looked as if he were just ducking from sight, and by the time anyone thought to check below ground, they'd hopefully already be long gone.
The others had already gone ahead, they were nearly halfway down the first long hall by the time he reached the bottom of the staircase. Harry lingered just long enough to cast a shield that stretched from one corner of the double doors to the other, a temporary reinforcement against any other surprises that might try and break through, then he set off after the others deeper into Manhattan's not so secret, sacred underground.
Carved in the earth beneath the cathedral were a network of intersecting corridors that formed St. Joseph's catacombs, the final resting place of cardinals, archbishops, and really anyone important (or wealthy) enough to afford such a prestigious tomb. They were a maze of too many identical halls branching and merging and leading to dead ends seemingly at random, but the heads had made sure to burn the layout of every nook, corner, and branching hall into their memories until Harry and his team could navigate the mess of passages better than the residing cardinal.
Walden led the pack with a brisk, walk/jog hybrid, mindful of Iola's bullet riddled state while also still very aware of the fact that New York's finest and an actual squad of superheroes could quite literally come down on their head any second. Harry hung back as the strong caboose, vanishing the trail of blood she was leaking in her wake while at the same time fighting a sudden and very severe case of claustrophobia. Because down here, it was crowded.
The two hundred years the church had been burying people under their floorboards had amassed them a body count well into the hundreds and now the occupants of these tombs were dragging themselves from their resting place to watch with gaping, dead eyes as the master of death navigated the halls.
Most of the souls kept their distance, stalking along the halls with him but being sure to keep a few meters back at all times. While others weren't so considerate, dogging his heels so closely he knew that if they were corporeal, they'd be stepping on the backs of his shoes. None of them were hostile, Harry got the sense that they were curious, content to act as nothing more than silent watchers, but as they ventured deeper into the crypts, he found they weren't the only ones down here.
He saw the woman first, the same one from upstairs. She was waiting at the end of the first and longest corridor, but as his group raced toward her, she flickered from sight.
When they took a sharp turn around the next corner, they ran right through a group of reporters. Harry remembered them, the brave ones who'd kept the cameras rolling even as demon patroni ravaged the service men around them. Right up until those same patroni tore through all their prey and went looking for more souls to mangle in the reporters themselves. They'd gone screaming, from the looks of it, and hadn't stopped even after death, emitting an awful, wordless wailing from slack jaws hung wider than should be possible for humans. Harry stumbled out of his jog when the wall of sound first hit him, in the confined but echoing space of the tombs their screams bounced from marble wall to wall, amplifying until it sounded like the voices of hundreds. Even after he left them behind, their cries followed him around every corner until he was sure the haunting noise was inescapable.
And down another corridor, two dozen men in suits reached for him.
For most, shades were less tangible than even ghosts; they couldn't be seen with the naked eye, and they definitely couldn't touch. But Harry had touched them in the past- Fred, the burned woman in London- his power over death allowed them some semblance of corporeality. It was supposed to be only when he wanted them to, but he'd already shown that he had poor control over the Heart. And now, with it freshly free and growing outside the confines of his collar at last, he felt he had less control over it than ever.
So, when the secret service men reached for Harry, they made contact. He could feel the drag of their souls as they reached for him, pawed at his clothing, tried to yank him every which way. Muttering as they did around mouths full of blood, broken jaws, and gaping holes in places they shouldn't be. These men Harry had killed, with his own hands, his own magic and they knew it. Their anger made them stronger than should be possible, not yet fully corporeal, but still just enough to make every touch hurt.
And these ones did follow; forming an awful mass of angry spirits around him that seemed to grow in size the deeper they went. More secret service, event staff, civilians, and strangers too. Men and women Harry had never seen and knew hadn't been among the memorial but stalked him within these tombs anyway.
He was so overwhelmed by the press of shades, he almost didn't notice when his group stopped, they'd turned down a hall that lead to a dead end and come to a stop just in front of a blank stretch of wall at the end of a line of family tombs. It was only when the mages moved to either side of the hall, turning expectant gazes on him that Harry remembered his part in their escape.
He moved from his spot at the back of the pack, pressed the tips of his fingers to concrete, and thought of what was just on the other side of the wall. A hole began eating away where his fingers touched, stretching taller and wider than the largest of their group while burrowing deep past dirt and roots and insects until he met more concrete and dug right past that too.
The smell on the other side was awful, shit and rust and mold and rats, but Harry stepped into the sewer with relief and Walden and the rest of the team were tripping over themselves to follow.
"Holy fuck." Crane gasped, sucking up the fetid air in greedy gulps. "We made it. Did we actually just do that?"
"Give us another half hour and we'll even have gotten away with it," Walden laughed, because honestly, he couldn't really believe it himself.
Harry kept silent, taking just a second to restore both sides of the wall before trudging through ankle deep greywater to put some distance between himself and the others. Then he squatted, right there in the muck, and dropped his head to his knees.
"They haven't thought to look down here yet." The sound of his voice was casual and unshaken even while coming from the cradle of his knees. "Take some time to regroup, catch your breath. I need a minute."
He'd hoped the shades would stay confined to the cathedral's grounds and the crypts beneath them, but that had been stupid, foolish hoping. They'd clambered through the hole after him, phased through the wall after he'd sealed that up, and continued to dog his every footstep. They surrounded him, twenty on each side, grabbing and wailing and cursing him all at once.
He wanted to shake, to curl in on himself, gouge his eardrums out, his eyeballs, just to make it stop. It was like that day an entire lifetime ago, back when he'd been hours fresh from killing Voldemort and endlessly optimistic for what the future had to hold, the Hallows newly united in his chest, the overwhelming press of greedy shades vying for his attention that had spiraled him into a panic attack. But he couldn't afford that here. He could feel no signs of life other than their ten pinpoints down on this level, no one had followed them yet, but it still wasn't safe to stop, just a few minutes was all those upstairs needed to catch up.
But he couldn't function, and he certainly couldn't lead impaired as he was. He had to take the chance.
"Help me." He gritted the plea between clenched teeth and wasn't even sure it could be heard over the roar of the shades surrounding him. But Death had never left his side, a cool hand fit itself in the scant stretch of space between the collar and the nape of Harry's neck and squeezed.
"You allow yourself to be overwhelmed too easily." Instead of sounding mocking, Death sounded exasperated but also…fond. "Do not bow before them." The hand at his nape yanked until Harry was no longer doubled over, he was still squatting in the filthy water, but he at least wasn't folded in on himself anymore. "You are the master of all dead things. Tell them to be quiet."
Harry's lips quivered around the word, barely able to form the two syllables. "Quiet."
The shades surged against him, and in direct opposition to his weak command, their wailing became louder, so intense he was sure his ears would begin to bleed. And their hands were everywhere, he could feel their nails clawing at his skin, he was sure beneath all of his layers he would find scores of raw scratch marks up and down his back and arms.
"Quark." Death sounded only a little admonishing now. "Tell them."
The Heart pulsed in agreement, she was weak still, he could feel her literally drinking from his magic. A slow drag impossible to describe simply because he'd never felt anything like it. But it was there.
Harry focused on that feeling, of the connection between his own power and that of his Heart. He could remember the first time he'd done this, all the way back at the start of this harrowing adventure. The shades then had been softer, wore the faces of friends and when they'd spoken it had been haunting and eerie but not cruel. He'd been terrified then because he hadn't known what they were or what they wanted. It's been actual years since that day and he's still terrified, but this time that fear came from knowing exactly what these afterimages were and what they were after.
But back then he was alone, too scared to accept the Heart and too weak to deserve Death. He was neither now, and when he spoke again, it was with all of the command and conviction he'd lacked the first time. He was the master of all dead things.
"Quiet."
Death's hum of approval was shockingly clear and like music in the sudden silence. The jaws of half a hundred shades hung open, mid-wail, but not a sound was emitted.
"These shades have no power over you," Death spoke into the ringing quiet. "Their anger means nothing. You, as my protegee, made the decision that their time was over, so over it was. They have no rights to anger, to protest, to harass. This is the way it was meant to go, and these mortal souls have no say in it. Any pain or discomfort they're able to inflict on you is through your own will. Stop allowing your guilt to fuel this power and find your purpose. For it and them."
Harry, who'd been following along impressively up until that last sentence, cut in there. "They have a purpose?"
"If you will it."
"Will it to…what?"
Ah, the expression there on Death's face was one he was much more familiar with; one of sheer disbelief that one person could be so stupid. Harry liked when Death was kind and comforting, but he'd considered the entity as something like a better dressed, slightly less malicious Snape, comfort just wasn't what he expected from him.
"Where are we going, Quark?"
"Back…back to base."
"Why?"
Harry blinked, parroted back. "Why?"
"Why?" Death repeated, clearly with no inclination to elaborate in any way that might be helpful.
"Because…" Well shit, now Harry really felt as stupid as Death probably thought he was. "…that's where we're meant to rally?"
"Quark." Death snapped, and the one word was capable of making him feel all of one inch tall. Snape could never. (He needed at least two to pull that off). "Did you get knocked over the head? You're free. That device," he spat the word like it was coated in flobberworm slime, "is moot. You could walk away. Probably even free your mages and be gone before they even knew they needed to look. So why are you going back?"
"Strucker is there. And so is Pierce. And the lady general. And the two other men, the geek and the Sheik. All of the heads, in one place. That's a golden opportunity."
"To do what?"
"To kill them."
Harry flinched the moment he said it. He hadn't thought to voice that out loud anywhere where he might be overheard. But he wouldn't take it back. How often could all of the heads of HYDRA be found in the same building? It was less likely than seeing all members of the presidential line of succession anywhere in range of each other.
It didn't surprise Harry when Death picked up his thought as if he'd been perusing them right alongside Harry. It was becoming more and more frequent, finding that he and Death were of the same mind. "Heracles had the right idea, didn't he? One head isn't enough, but all five severed at once and cauterized right after…that might do it."
"And that can be done with them?" The shades surrounding them hadn't moved, hadn't made a sound either, but that overwhelmingly malicious aura that had tainted them was gone. Instead they just seemed as if they were waiting. For him? For orders? "How?"
The shine in Death's eyes frightened Harry. Just as much as it thrilled him. "I think it's time, Quark, that I provide a little more insight into what it means to possess the Heart of the Universe."
Death's touch no longer shocked or unsettled Harry as it had in the early days. The cold of it was a familiar comfort actually, but he still startled when he grabbed Harry's wrist without any warning and yanked his sleeve back, strapped to his arm was the borrowed wand, the handle entirely blackened and tiny fissures running along its entire length.
"To have such a bond with our Heart gives you power over the Universe." He poked at the handle, observed the film of soot that rubbed off on his fingertips. "You can bend, rewrite, erase reality. Manipulation of the universe's energy on a cosmic level. It's admirable how long this little stick held up while attempting to channel that scope of power."
"But I don't have her full power?" It was a definitive statement, but Harry spoke it like a question. "Most of the Heart was destroyed, I only have a few of the pieces left."
"Yes and no. Thanos held the Heart in her entirety, but it was an unwilling union and so he struggled to wield her at her full might. You, quark, possess only her fragments, but you and she are closely bound, and so her power comes easiest to you. You have less of the raw power the Mad Titan was able to throw around, but in exchange you'll be capable of a greater control that will allow your power to be just as effective and still devastating.
"You're the best of the Heart, best of myself, and the very best of what you once possessed. Even I'd be wary of crossing you."
"But that power's always taken time," Harry protested. "It never just came when I called it."
"That's because you didn't know how." Death looked around at the crowd of tortured souls, standing at perfect attention on all sides. "But I'd say you might be starting to get the hang of it."
Harry scowled and the shades stirred. "This isn't power."
"Isn't it? Quark, if you believe that, then I mourn your lack of imagination."
Harry bit down on his frustrations, he'd had years practicing patience when it came to beings sporting these all-knowing attitudes. "Explain it to me."
"I said already, you are the master of all dead things. These shades, all shades, are an army to command."
"An invisible, incorporeal army."
Death smirked. "They made you bleed, didn't they?"
With the furrows from undead fingers still smarting against his skin, Harry couldn't find a thing to argue. "Teach me."
And Death really must be in the right mood because he did.
There was something else here.
Not the ghosts, even though those were definitely a thing. The haunting had started mildly enough, whispers that could easily be passed off as the scuttling of rats, a flash of washed-out color and half visible faces that vanished the moment he rounded the corner, specters the lurked in his peripheral but were never there when he turned to face them head on. It was just little things that Walden was able to convince himself were just products of too much stress and the really creepy setting. But they got to the sewers and it got worse, it got real.
The air around Harry warped, folding in on itself the way it did when it was particularly hot outside. And in that mirage, Walden could see the barely substantial forms of a dozen…two…three surrounding Harry, bearing down on him from all sides and wailing obscenities, and accusations, and pure hatred at him. He bowed under the weight of their loathing, tried to hide from them in the cradle of his knees.
"Help me."
The words hadn't been spoken for any of them to hear. Raw and desperate and as nearly unhinged as they were, Walden wasn't sure Harry had even meant to speak them out loud. But for how softly they'd been spoken, they carried easily through the cavernous space of the sewer tunnel and made sure every mage was paying close attention. And so they were all already watching when his plea was answered.
No words existed to describe the…thing. It was of dark, that much he could say, not like shadow but like the complete lack of anything, a hole carved into space and bleeding along the edges of his reality. But Harry looked at it, reached for it, spoke to it.
And it spoke back.
Its voice was the groan of a millennia old glacier sundering in half. Walden shivered just to hear it, touched by such a deep, existential dread he wouldn't have been surprised to just drop dead right there.
Yet Harry seemed…comforted by the thing. He uncurled from himself, the spirits retreated, and he began to speak. A low buzz, too quiet to pick up, but clearly intense, and clearly not one sided.
Walden had to look away, the urge so strong he actually turned his back. There was an itch at the back of his head he'd never felt before, he was sure it came from looking too long at that insubstantial figure. It wasn't meant to be taken in by human eyes, that voice, the lack of light or anything that shaped it, these were things to drive a man mad.
So, he kept his back turned, even tried to plug his ears because even though no words were audible, that ancient groaning burrowed deep into his ear drums and throbbed every time. And he stayed that way until there was a slow shuffle, then a sudden release of pressure. When he cautiously risked a glance over his shoulder, the room was empty of spirits and Lovecraftian shadows alike, and Harry was standing steady on his own two feet.
He flicked his wrist and the water collecting in the fabric of his robes wrung itself out. "Minute's up."
And like they were all supposed to just ignore the freakshow they'd just witnessed, he turned and began marching in the direction of their exit. But Angel caught him at the elbow and said, with emphasis. "No, but what the fuck?"
Harry didn't flinch, even when he was stopped in his tracks hard enough for that hood to finally fall away from his face. He looked off, the little color he had was stripped from his face, highlighting the dark bruises under each of his unnatural green eyes, but his stare was stone cold and steady.
"We killed a lot of people up there," he said plainly. "They're angry."
Angel dropped his arm. Stepped back. "But how…"
Harry scoffed, but his face kept strangely blank. "Oh, don't play stupid. You all know the rumors and I'm sure you've read the tales of the Bard, you know what I did. What I am."
"We don't," Eva whispered. "They never told us."
"Then guess. But do it on your own time, I've wasted enough as it is."
He turned again, but this time Angel didn't need to touch him to stop him in his tracks.
"Do you not trust us?" The others gaped at him, but ever the brave one he steamrolled ahead. "Because every question we've ever asked has been answered with some half-truth and another order to just trust blindly. But do you even trust us?"
"No."
Even Walden felt his mouth drop. Months of training together, fighting together, killing together, and the answer still was no? They'd had a rough start, no argument there, but he thought they'd worked past all of that.
"Don't let it hurt your feelings though. I've been pretty well conditioned at this point not to trust anyone. It hasn't done me much good in the past, see."
"You think we'd betray you?" Iola asked, and her voice was so tiny, not even from the blood she was losing.
When Harry looked at her, that blank look softened if only a little. "I don't think you'd have much choice. But now isn't the time, every second we waste down here sharing our feelings is another second closer to those guys upstairs catching us. We'll have time to discuss, but later."
To leave the sewers they had to cross under Madison Avenue and travel the line that ran parallel to 51st Street. Maybe eight hundred meters in, or the length of a couple city blocks, there was an access tunnel with a grate in its ceiling that swung up into the floor of the dual basement/laundry room of some hotel that sat right on the edge of the action.
The place was empty when they clambered from the hole in the ground, just as HYDRA promised it would be, and up the stairs, through the cramped employee kitchen was a door that opened into the alleyway, a little sliver of calm just off pure chaos. Park Avenue was a crush of bodies pushing toward the church. The thousands of mostly peaceful protestors had transformed into a mob of hysterical rioters attempting to push their way past the cordoned off street, forcing the police to split their attention between keeping them back and corralling the hysterical witnesses flooding from the hole in the side of the church. It was a scene out of one of those apocalyptic movies; the little fires spread up and down the street, the cars abandoned on the road with their windows smashed in, the reapers everywhere. And thanks to that long, awful walk through the sewers they were on the other side of it.
The mess of berserker New Yorkers stood as a perfect barrier between the eleven- now ten- mages and every law enforcement officer the borough of Manhattan had to offer.
Before even climbing out of the sewers, they'd shed and burned their outer robes and those distinctive red gloves, leaving them in the dark pants and shirt indistinguishable from half the crowd. No different from anyone else on this side of the crowd, they were able to limp unimpeded to the riot's origin, a little stretch of green the city had generously named a park, where a triage of sorts had been set up.
"Excuse me!" Harry found a pair of attendants taking a breather at the edge of the park and made straight for them. "Please, my friend's injured."
Iola swayed convincingly on her feet, and come to think of it that probably wasn't an act, she was losing blood still and they'd been walking a while. The men wasted no time hustling her to a nearby van marked with a mobile triage symbol.
"Three in the back, two up front." The first attendant instructed. "There's another van on the south end of the park to take the rest of you."
No words were exchanged, Harry and Angel hopped into the back of the van, then turned to help Iola up after them, Fen and Mihaela headed around to the front, while the rest broke off to follow the second attendant.
There weren't any seats in the back, just two short benches that ran along either side of the interior, once they were safely seated, the doors slammed shut behind them and they jerked into motion.
Rumlow looked Harry over, spared Iola half a glance, then said, "Rally was a half hour ago."
Harry grit his teeth and didn't even bother trying to hide his scowl. Today had been trying; the adrenaline rush that had been carrying him through the awful events of the past hour had long since run out, his arms, chest, back, everything were stiff and sore from the grasping, clawing of the dead, and no amount of cleaning charms had been successful in getting the stink of shit from his shoes. His patience was at zero, and with it his ability to remain subservient in the face of these HYDRA fucks.
"We ran into trouble on the way out." He said, just on the wrong side of too sarcastic. "Maybe you saw, Captain America was there."
He watched for a flinch, a grimace, some indication of surprise from Rumlow, he'd dropped that name on purpose, with the intent of rousing a reaction, but all he got was a tick of an eyebrow and a nonchalant shrug. Steve's presence in this timeline, it seemed, wasn't news to Rumlow.
"Yeah, well the riot wasn't guaranteed to keep them all back. You handled it."
"We did." The need to understand how Steve was running around in the entirely wrong century was like the burning itch of a bug's bite, a persistent discomfort that only got worse the more attention he paid it. But Harry was learning how to prioritize, and of the hundred and one things left to do today, scratching that itch ranked the lowest. Steve had managed to survive somehow for seventy plus years, he could hold on another day or two.
Iola though, was another story. The wall of the van behind her was painted red with the blood she was still losing, and her eyes had gone vacant. Like a good soldier she'd held it together the entire slog underground and through the streets, but now the danger was gone and the van was started on its meandering route to base and her composure crumbled. Dew coated her bloodless cheeks, and her lips were going an alarming shade of blue. It was June in an overpopulated city fired up over their chief politician's live-streamed murder just a few blocks away, hot wasn't an accurate descriptor for the temperatures soaring outside and turning the clunky van into an oven, but Iola's teeth chattered the same as Harry's had that one time he'd been forced to take a dip in the Great Lake in the middle of February.
Harry counted three bullet wounds on her body; the first was only a graze across her bicep, the second had gone through the front and out the back of her shoulder, but the third and most worrying was burrowed off center of her torso, to the right of her stomach, somewhere in the area Harry thought a kidney might be. She'd kept a steady pressure on the wound since they'd sat down, but it was from there she was losing most of her blood.
"Who's the medic on this team?" Harry demanded, then jerked in surprise when Rumlow simply used his foot to propel a bulky black box across the floor in Harry's direction.
"Triage kit," was all the man offered. "We don't really have a medic, it's more of a DIY kinda thing."
Harry hissed in disgust, but accepted the kit when Angel handed it to him. It was well stocked with tons of gauze, wrappings, suture kits, and blood clot aides, but they might as well be professional grade surgical equipment for all Harry knew what to do with them. He hadn't exactly been given access to medical supplies after a session of Harry Hunting or his Aunt's erratic bouts of rage he'd suffered in his younger years, and wizards had no need for bandages when they had magic to heal most wounds almost instantly. The most he knew to do was how to wrap a bandage around an open wound but, call it intuition, he didn't think a flimsy contraption of gauze and medical tape would be enough to stop Iola losing another pint of blood.
The ever-present shadow at his shoulder that Harry called Death watched with something like interest as Harry rifled cluelessly through the neatly packaged tools.
"Why do you bother?"
Harry's only response was a look of pure…well, death, cold enough to frost steel. But this only amused Death who raised his hands in mock surrender, a human gesture he'd never done before.
"I meant, why do you bother with the little wrappings and threads. This useless thing," a long, pale finger plucked at the inert collar hidden well beneath the high neck of Harry's shirt, "hasn't been activated yet, you wouldn't give up the game by healing her in ways more effective."
Because Harry was pants at healing spells, he hadn't mastered anything more advanced than an episkey even after enduring two wars, and Iola was already in rough enough shape without him fumbling around with spells he'd never attempted.
Death read the thoughts from his face as easily as Voldemort might have read it from his mind. "You don't need the words, you're not a wizard who has to draw power from an outside source, you are the power. Look at her."
Harry set the box aside and chose to observe Iola's wounds instead, he was willing at least to entertain Death for a moment, the entity was a surprisingly good teacher when he was in the mood for it.
"What will kill her first?"
A bullet wound so close to her gut opened up the possibility of a myriad of unpleasant deaths; fatal damage to the organs, ruptured intestines, bacterial leakage into her abdominal cavity. But Harry looked the way Death had instructed and it clicked.
Harry had spent the first seven years of his life not being able to see, he hadn't been allowed luxuries like regular physicals and appointments with the optometrist. But he'd started primary school that year and the way he squinted to make out anything more than a few meters from his face was less easy to ignore. After the fourth suggestion from his teacher, a handwritten note that was beginning to stink of the kind of concern for Harry that made his aunt angry, Petunia gave in and had him outfitted with the cheapest set of frames she could manage. Harry hadn't even known the world could exist in such crisp detail. The little things like the curling white shape of clouds against blue sky, the tiny hairs on the spiders of his cupboard, the shape of his own eyes in the mirror, they had all gone missed in the blurry smudges of the rest of the world. But the moment he'd pushed those lenses up his nose, he realized there was so much he hadn't discovered.
That was what this felt like. Just this morning Iola had existed as a familiar, three-dimensional figure; flesh and blood, easily read expressions, and distinctive features shaped and creased and colored in ways entirely unique to her. But Death told him to look, and through the lens of his Heart he saw everything he'd missed before. He counted every day she lived from the microscopic lines that crinkled her forehead, saw the scarred over mess her lost magic left in the pockmarks of her core, and basked in the glow of her soul literally radiating from her skin. It didn't have a solid form, no one place inside of her that it resided, it existed in every fiber of muscle, every blood cell, and strand of DNA, a shapeless energy that powered something greater than simply muscle movement and neural activity. But Harry knew how easy it was to wind the gossamer threads of soul around his fingers, how little effort it took to gather it, compress it into one mass that could be held, even removed with enough force. He reached for it with just a thought, he didn't even have to touch her, and read every moment she'd ever existed from it and saw the moment where it could end.
So, to answer Death's question…
"Blood loss will kill her first. I have to stop the bleeding with…"
Not a spell, Death had said. But then what else? He couldn't just will it to happen.
Couldn't he?
He'd never performed powerful healing magic, but he'd had it performed on himself countless times. He was intimately familiar with the feel of magic literally knitting his skin back together, the way it grew missing flesh from the ragged edges that were left, and sealed it all together without even a scar.
Angel slid out of the way so Harry could take his spot beside Iola, and Rumlow watched from the other side of the van, openly interested and not at all inclined to help.
There was only one time in his life Harry could recall almost seeing the power of healing magic at work, not the bright color of spells, but the actual presence of magic being conducted from the tip of a wand. It had been some five or six years ago, in a bathroom lit only by weakly reflected sunlight, it had smelled sharply of copper on tile, and he could still hear the wretched gasping of a boy near death and the song-like incantation that had saved his life. He held that memory tight as he pressed the tips of his fingers into Iola's blood-soaked side and reached for the bullet.
She screamed and tried to arch away from Harry's touch, but Angel was on her immediately, pressing her down onto the bench and keeping her completely still with gentle but unflinching arms. The van gave a little jerk, their driver caught off guard for half a second by the unholy sound that tore from Iola's throat, and Mihaela and Fen were practically throwing themselves over their seats to put their eyes on whatever danger their teammate had to be facing. But Harry didn't flinch, he kept wholly focused on his task and slowly extricating the bullet through the same path it had cut into her.
It hit the ground with a quite ring that was lost in the sound of Iola's agony. But then he was willing her skin to regenerate, conjuring torn muscle from nothing, and painstakingly weaving it back together. The final product wasn't pretty, the skin had sealed together in a thick, ropy scar the size of his palm, but she wasn't bleeding anymore and the moment he pulled away her screaming stopped. She leaned heavily into Angel's side, her entire chest heaved with great, rattling breaths but her eyes were clearer already.
Harry stooped down and fished through the mess of blood she'd made on the floor, before reaching up to place the extracted bullet, still in one piece and shining slightly under the coating of blood into her violently trembling hand. "Sorry."
Then he sat back in his seat and tried to ignore the burn of Rumlow's intense regard.
"That's a neat trick," the man said. "You know you're actually proving to be kind of useful, kid. Got a wide skill set and you're a good fighter, good killer. We might have to ask Strucker to loan you out a little more often."
Harry laughed, because…well it was laughable. "Over his dead body."
He let himself slump into his seat just a little, reached for the press of Death's shoulder against his and felt himself finally relax, because the hardest part was over.
Everything that came now was just good fun.
They entered the hospital car park, rolled past the gates that finally mean safety, and, like it was on a trigger, Harry's collar started back up with a mechanical tick-tick-tick Harry had never heard before, followed by the familiar, almost painful tingle of electricity down his spine. History dictated that any moment he should feel the severance of his magic, his collar would activate, and the outside electricity source would suppress own brain's power and mute his ability to grasp control of his magic.
Except nothing came. Nothing left.
All Harry needed to do was exhale and he could feel the magic quiver in his lungs, and it stuck around, didn't falter or slip from his grasp any other time the strip of metal wrapped around his throat was active. A spell almost sprung from his lips, just for the thrill of being proved right, but he held himself, added another pinprick of pain to the single aching bruise his body had become when he bit hard on the inside of his cheek just to contain the spill of Latin. Because he had just the one chance to tackle this hydra and he wouldn't misstep.
When the van stopped he was first out and offering a hand to Iola to keep her dismount steady. The second van had made it before them, they'd taken separate, winding routes that at some point put the rest of his team ahead of them. But while they were already waiting in the covered car park, there was one noticeable absence. Strucker had always made sure his face was the first they saw upon returning from the few missions they'd run before this, but this time, after what was arguably their most important job yet, the port was empty. And he wasn't inside either, no one was. The ten mages, one masked soldier, and STRIKE entered through the lobby and found all but the emergency lights shut off, all of the doors set every few meters along the one, long hall were locked tight as if no one had even shown up to start the day.
"Have the rest gone ahead home already?"
"Not yet," Rumlow sighed through his nose, he was leading them to the elevator across from a darkened break room, then mashing the glowing, orange button to take them up three flights. "That's tomorrow. Tonight, we're working the fallout. It's probably where everyone is."
Harry didn't know what "the fallout" was or how one "worked it", and Rumlow didn't give him time to ask for clarification on either as he was already steamrolling ahead.
"Orders are to get you patched, cleaned, then seated for debrief. Except you," he jerked his chin in Harry's direction. "Strucker wants to see you right away."
The old elevator took them up three flights, and when it juddered to a halt, weak-kneed Iola stumbled into Harry's side. He caught her easily, helped put her to rights, and when the lift dinged their arrival he was still close enough to breathe a warning into her ear.
"Be ready."
They were broken apart by the time the doors slid open and didn't even spare a glance for the other as they were split up and sent in opposite directions. Harry kept a sedate pace at Rumlow's side as he was led to the secondary mess hall they had been running attack strategies in just the day before. The wide space had been converted from the smaller scale replica of the cathedral's sanctuary to a war room; the pews had all been cleared out and in their exact place were identical rows of workstations taken up by large monitors running images and numbers and faces and broadcasts. So many Harry couldn't keep up with, all being altered, edited, manipulated by HYDRA's men.
"Working the fallout" suddenly made a lot more sense. Because of course killing Ellis was just the first pitch in a long game, Harry had done his part and these people here had been waiting in the wings to swoop in and take control of the narrative being relayed to the public. They were aiming for maximum damage to the outed wizarding world by fanning the flames of conspiracy that groups like the Task Force had been preaching for years now.
Really, but if they weren't so evil, their cunning would be impressive.
"Baron's up this way."
Harry didn't even realize he'd been lingering in the entrance until Rumlow gave a tug to his elbow, it was a quick touch, just enough to jerk him back into motion without lingering any longer than he needed.
Harry followed him down the center aisle that opened up to the head of the room. Where the replica dais had stood just a few days ago, there was now a long conference table (that strangely enough didn't come with a single chair) set up beneath a wall of television screens, each one broadcasting coverage of the attack from the perspective of several different news organization. The five heads were arranged loosely around the table, working as a seamless unit to conduct the flow of activity while dictating orders to the aides bustling around.
But Harry approached and immediately their focus shifted.
"Our hero returns!" Strucker swept his arms open in a grand gesture of welcome, his smile was wide enough to fold his brow halfway over that ubiquitous monocle and, idly, Harry wondered if he might be smudging the lens. "That was beautifully done."
"And back just under four hours. We are very impressed." The Sheik added, and there was a new look in his eyes Harry didn't care for at all.
The Sheik had spent the last few days acting as one of the less obtrusive heads, he'd offered advice and aid as needed but for the most part he stood back and allowed Strucker and Pierce to run the show. Even when addressing the mages, he spoke of them like tools, useful tools, but tools still. This man, Harry was learning, had dealings in all sorts of weaponry, and it was clear he saw the mages as just another stock rifle, capable of massive devastation in a short window, worthy of its handler's utmost caution and respect, but still just another dime a dozen weapon, easily forgotten, easily replaced.
Now he saw what they really were, and that casual disinterest was gone, replaced by a wide-eyed hunger.
"The Captain slowed us down," Harry said so casually he even believed it himself, but he was watching for it and so saw the minute way Strucker's jaw twitched. "We made up for it though in the crypts."
"You ran into no one?"
"It was a ghost town," Harry said, then tried not to laugh at the unintended joke, because maybe he was a little funny? To distract from his own slip, he looked pointedly around the room, still a hive of activity. "We were successful?"
Strucker gave him the kind of smile that had always made his skin crawl. "More than. War's afoot."
"Afoot?" Afoot didn't mean here. "How long until the fighting starts do you think?"
It was possible he came off sounding too interested, but he knew it would play off well. He'd told Strucker ages ago, before their attempts to break him, that he wanted to work with HYDRA to end the wizarding world, he wanted the war and the bloodshed for his former people. His desire for revenge was greater than his hatred for HYDRA and Strucker knew that.
And sure enough, the older man answered right away, with the same ease any monologuing supervillain took on. "Soon enough, we think. The wizards are running out of places to hide and, after today, the task force will find themselves with an unprecedented amount of support. Our estimates predict the year won't end before they're shedding blood. By next, we should be ready to intervene."
It was nearing the end of June now; the year's end was just six months away. Six months away from a world dominated totally by HYDRA, and that had been made indisputably possible by their actions today. Harry thought he should maybe feel a little bad for the gamble he was taking with basically everyone's lives, but he was pretty assured that the risk was worth the reward. And when his magic burbled beneath his skin, sending a nearby monitor on the fritz, he felt even more sure, like it was just confirming what he already knew.
"So until then," he said, "we're just…waiting? Standing back while they rip each other apart? Or is there more to do?"
"There's always more to do!" The notion seemed to make Strucker excited where anyone else might bemoan the need for more work. "After Ellis' all but confirmation…"
(Even Harry smiled at the memory of the way the president had spat that word: wizards.)
"…there is no one else the American's will blame. All lingering doubt of the existence of magic and its secret sub-world is gone now, they will begin hunting them like dogs. Our priority now is to make sure that focus remains on the wizards; we'll stage a few more attacks, fan the flames, and handle the few loose agents we still have running around. Members of your government who survived our sundering. We'll need to make sure they don't speak to anyone else."
This was news to Harry who didn't know anyone had survived. "Anyone else?"
"Yes." Strucker managed to make the tiny breath he huffed through his nose sound right on the edge of frustrated, a surprising admission of humanity. "Handling our former allies in the ICW will be priority these next few weeks. They've already begun dealings with those directly opposed to us, they'll need to be silenced quickly or this all falls apart."
Well, that wouldn't do. Harry had done too much today to allow a few particularly resilient ICW members to muck it all up. "Do we know where to find them?"
"Finding them isn't the issue…"
"It's getting to them," he sighed before Strucker had to. "Yeah, that's usually the case." But Harry was motivated, he would find a way. "How many are left?"
"Just a handful. The leader, Akingbade, and a few of his men, but still more than enough to cause us trouble."
Harry hummed in agreement. "More than enough." Wizards were an unfortunately troublesome bunch (and yes he was including himself in that number).
"But that is a discussion for tomorrow, your work tonight is done. The showers are fully yours and we've prepared a feast to replenish the calories burned today. We'll save the debriefs for the morning, then we will flee the country."
Harry took on expression of surprise. "Tomorrow?"
"It's easy to slip through when they're all so worked up," Strucker said. "The chaos works in our favor. Many of Pierce's men have gone already and he will be too, in just a few hours. By tomorrow no one will be left."
Harry nodded agreeably, now that Strucker had drawn his attention to it, he catalogued the occupants of the room and realized they were a lot less than they first seemed. The hall was large enough to fit a crowd maybe half the size they'd seen in St. Joseph's, around seven hundred or so, but less than two hundred actually took up the space. A few of the guards Harry had gotten to know back at Strucker's base, including Coleman and Bennet, were hanging around the edges of the room, and the STRIKE team and the masked soldier were keeping right in Pierce's vicinity, but the rest of the room were the techs, the computer whizzes and the administrative workers, not the fighters.
A spark that felt suspiciously like excitement singed a path down Harry's spine, maybe twenty fighters stood between him and the heads. A daunting number to just about anyone, especially when considering those twenty were the cream of HYDRA's crop, but Harry had just taken out some of the best the American government had to offer and he felt energized. It was a strange, unfamiliar, terrifying realization, but he felt…confident.
His magic was unbound, eager to be used, and he had an army building at his back. He was ready for them. He was ready to be free and thanks to the Heart's backing and Death's tutelage, he finally had the means to accomplish it.
By the time Harry had clambered to his feet, wrung that shit water from his robes, and rallied his mages to finally navigate their way from the sewers, the shades had been tucked from sight. It was a simple trick Death taught him, a way to mask their crowding presence enough to not be a distraction without completely banishing them to the next life. They were still all around him, he could feel them like a cold breath down the back of his neck, lingering just beyond his awareness but too unnatural to be completely forgotten.
And now, just a few hours later, when he was ready to see them again, all he needed to do was lower the hedge maze of magic he'd built around himself and there they were. And their numbers had grown, because as he'd traveled through the sewers, emerged onto the street, made his way through the mob, and crossed boroughs to their base in a hospital where (despite the former staff's every effort) a lot of people had died, they'd picked up all manners of broken souls. The ghosts of a city as densely populated and with as violent a history as Manhattan had felt the pull of his Heart and, like magnets to a pole, gravitated to him.
So where before his entourage of undead had barely been breaking thirty, he looked around the room now and saw over three hundred easy. And instead of clumping around Harry in one impenetrable wall of washed-out bodies, they were spread around the room, stalking the aisles and outnumbering the still oblivious living three to one.
"This doesn't happen very often, does it?" Instead of heading for the promised rest and replenishment as directed, Harry shifted closer to Strucker, eyes bright with curiosity. The baron accepted his silent request to linger, but ticked a curious eyebrow, not yet understanding Harry's vague question.
He elaborated. "Having all of you, together at once."
"Ah no, we don't find reason to convene often."
"It's pretty good reasoning. I'm sure it was easier for Heracles once the heads were all together, taking them on one by one wouldn't do any good, but clumped together it probably just took one really strong swing." Harry flicked his own wrist in an aborted little imitation of what he imagined that blow might have looked like. "Some people might call it serendipity, getting you all here, but we worked hard to make it happen, didn't we? I know I did."
And in a testament to his own arrogance, Strucker agreed. He was maybe a little confused by what brought on Harry's sudden desire to monologue, but there was no suspicion. He actually looked a little pleased. "It's been a long journey. Lifetime's devoted to this work, but we're here."
"But we're here." Harry parroted with a grin too full of teeth, it was one ripped off straight from Death. "And it took everything. Do you remember when we first met?" Godric it felt like ages ago, but really it had only been a year. Maybe two. "Do you remember the person I was?"
So much had happened between then and now, an entire remaking with a white fire that ripped straight through his mind and only made it all even hazier.
"I remember how convinced I was that I knew everything. That I'd seen the worst the world had to offer and was still able to come through with some decency intact, some convictions and morals. Two wars, two dark lords, time travel, and all the Death I'd seen and dealt with my own hands, and I thought none of it could shake me. But really I didn't know anything. I didn't know what it was to suffer until I met you." He hadn't meant to, but Harry spoke that confession softly, sweetly, reverently. Like Strucker had shown him the keys to the universe, because in a way, he had.
"All the stuff that came before, that was easy, of course I got through it mostly unscathed, only a little changed. This undoing was always the real test."
As if he couldn't help himself, Strucker cut in with, "And you've performed extraordinarily. Full marks."
Harry laughed, it was a sweet sentiment from such a notoriously cruel man, but… "Test isn't done yet."
He risked a glance over his shoulder. The other heads had long since lost interest in their conversation, it was only the two of them in this little bubble of solitude for a moment longer.
"It's been a long day," Harry sighed as he turned his attention back to Strucker. "And I've done a lot of killing in your name, I should be tired of it. But I think I have room for just a little more."
And finally, finally, Strucker was catching on. His expression didn't shift, but Harry watched as he unconsciously fell just a half a step back so he could look better at Harry, his eyes darted from the useless collar at his throat to the placid expression the young wizard was sporting. But he wasn't sure. Not yet.
But that was an easy fix.
Harry had had his fun, he'd always wanted the chance to monologue the same as any other supervillain, and if he was taking on the part (even if it was just for the day) he might as well just go on and fully commit to the schtick and all its pomp. But now it was time for the real work, and he was done playing games.
There was a pressure at the base of his rib cage, like a buildup of gas, but when he released it, it wasn't a burp that bubbled free. The magic he'd been allowing to build up, burst across the room like a charged wind, touching on the worker bees happily going about their world domineering tasks and freezing them where they stood.
Visually, the feat of magic was pretty subtle, most of the assembled guards were reclined against the wall or settled in a few of the only open seats, and the techs were so engrossed in their work they hadn't been tracking much movement to begin with. But the silence that fell over the room was unmistakably unnatural, the sudden lack of the rhythmic clack of keyboards, cross conversations, and rustling of papers, was like a void.
Strucker and his other heads had been the only ones purposely spared Harry's mass body bind, and while Pierce, Hale, the Sheik, and the Banker puzzled out exactly what was happening, Strucker wasted no time producing a semi-familiar, handheld tablet from some deep recess in his jacket. Harry had seen the controls to his collar only from a distance, he'd never been in close enough range to get any idea of how the thing worked, but even he knew repeatedly tapping what must have been the "ARM" command to his collar wasn't doing any kind of good.
"It isn't strong enough," Harry advised the baron as he rapidly input a string of commands onto the tablet that were summarily ignored. "Not anymore. You bound me because I was weak, but today," he touched his fingertips to the metal around his throat, released a shock of magic and immediately the current of electricity stopped, "today made me stronger."
In the space between the two hundred frozen bodies, ghostly images began taking shape as the shades under Harry's burgeoning power grew more and more corporeal. Harry watched as their presence registered with Strucker, his eyes tracked the slow manifestation of dozens on dozens of broken souls.
"What is this?" He asked, his voice pitched low, respectful of these unfamiliar new players and the obvious threat they posed.
If Harry was really being honest with himself, he'd been going kind of heavy with the theatrics because he'd been hoping for some fear, not Strucker's carefully tempered tone and the cautiously curious spark in his hard eyes. He was a little miffed he wasn't getting a bigger reaction, but there was still plenty of time for that.
"Shades," he offered rather graciously. "What's left of the mangled mess my mages and I made of the muggles."
Strucker considered his explanation, muddled it around for a moment before deciding simply on. "Ghosts?"
Just then, a shadow curled itself against the baron's back and still not fully tangible hands ghosted down the length of his arms, causing a violent shudder to rip down his spine. The woman with the two perfect curls and the hole through her eye was just visible beyond Strucker's shoulder, she was wearing a soft smile on her painted lips that spoke of sweet anticipation and a hint of malice.
"Not exactly ghosts," Harry corrected.
"Souls," Strucker realized as he slowly sidestepped from the woman's grip, enough to take her in in full. She allowed the examination only because of Harry's own heavy stare on her. "That you control."
For all his faults, Strucker really was brilliant, quick on the uptake.
"You didn't know true power," Harry mimicked the baron's own sentiment from not so long ago. "Not ever. You were so far off it should have been laughable. But I thought that after everything you've done, everything you've allowed today, I should let you see. Just once."
"Precious one." And there it was, the first sweet, quavering note of fear. But it still wasn't enough. "We have, haven't we? Done so much, all for your own good. I treated you like a son, my own blood, even when you were lost, confused, misguided. I helped you see the way. I only ever wanted the best for you."
"The best?" Harry cocked his head, his brows drew together just the little bit in the perfect picture of bewilderment. "Through pain? Through isolation, complete deprivation?Through taking me, breaking me, molding me into what best suited your cause?"
"Our cause. Since when did you no longer believe?" Strucker's eyes were bright with his fervent need to convince Harry of his own loyalty. "Have you forgotten so quickly everything we learned? The truth you fought so hard to embrace? We are not your enemy."
"Wolfgang." Pierce interrupted, the first of the heads brave enough to break their tableau. Strucker's hand whipped up, a universal gesture to wait. But Pierce was not one to be ordered around. "Wolfgang, enough. We do not reason with them. Put him in his place."
Harry laughed and three hundred hoarse voices joined in rasping harmony. "Hasn't he tried that already?"
"Triage."
The smile on Harry's face slid away.
Pierce smirked. "Golden."
A sudden, horrible lance of pain tore right down the center of his brain. He staggered back a step and Pierce moved in to close the gap.
"Forty-six."
Harry found himself falling back into the memory of white fire. Of the pain reaching into every recess of his brain and tearing his memories from their darkest hidden places, burning them from his reach.
"Cobalt."
These words, they had to be triggers, another layer of torture Harry hadn't ever even been aware of. They made his brain feel like mush, his thoughts go disjointed, he felt close to collapsing.
"Mother."
He wasn't fully sure what they were meant to do. To control him? Incapacitate? If it was the latter, it might actually prove successful.
"Hound."
But what would that mean for him, another failure? Strucker would never agree to dispose of him, so he'd be put back in that dark room, Bennet had already promised that much. They'd put him through the breaking again, longer this time. And maybe with his newly unleashed Heart they wouldn't be successful. But maybe they would? He remembered nothing of having these triggers installed, who knew what other means of controlling him they might possess?
For the first time, cold doubt gripped him.
"Benevolence."
But Death had promised. He'd promised that all Harry needed was to endure the breaking, the humiliation, the abandoning of his morals and the Heart would be his. He'd be strong enough to break free from his binds and never be held again. And for all his faults, Death had never lied.
"Pestilence."
It was the doubt that killed. That allowed him to be bound in the first place. And if he gave into his fear and his own mortal limitations, he'd be bound again.
Fuck that.
"Artifice."
Harry found his feet, still under him but dangerously close to giving out, he planted himself solidly and heaved a painful breath through lungs too constricted to work properly.
He bared his teeth.
"Moratorium."
The weight of the last trigger settled over him like a fisherman's net, but he shook it off on rapidly strengthening legs, and released the fog that had tried to entrap his mind in one long exhale.
"Kill him."
The woman with the curls reacted first. Harry rasped his command and she was on Pierce, knocking him off his feet and tumbling down in a mesh of half tangible limbs to the concrete below. But then there were another two shades joining her, grasping at limbs, tearing into the secretary with blunted nails.
His screams and the splash of bright red blood on concrete acted as the hammer to the tentative stillness that had gripped Hale, the Banker, and the Sheik. The latter two stumbled back, already beginning their retreat, while Hale reached for the gun at her thigh.
Harry heard the first crack of gunfire before he could even process what she was drawing, and his legs, recovering but not recovered, weren't quick enough to propel him out of the line of fire. And before he even knew it, he was shot.
The bullet found its home right at the base of his throat, in that perfect little valley his protruding collar bones made where they met at the center. He pitched backwards, a graceful arc that would have left him aching on impact, but then, in some macabre reenactment of a trust fall, two very solid arms caught him.
Death looked down on him with a little frown fixed to his face, judgment heavy in his dark gaze, but before he could emit a snarky comment, two things happened:
1. Harry's control over his magic faltered, the radiating pain in his throat distracted him just long enough for the mass body bind to fall away.
2. He released the shades from the steel grip he held over them. Intentionally.
What followed was chaos. His shades fell on the panicked mortals like sharks scenting blood. Of the two hundred or so HYDRA agents present, less than two dozen were actually carrying weapons and noy even those did them much good, because Harry's shades were already dead, they couldn't be killed twice and so their weapons had very little effect in actually getting rid of the violent souls.
"This is disgraceful, allowing that woman to get the jump on you." Death's cool fingers probed mercilessly into the wound at Harry's throat, gripping the edges of the slippery bullet and dislodging it with one, quick tug. Harry sputtered around the blood that suddenly flooded his throat, but surprisingly didn't feel the familiar wash of panic. The pain was awful, and he was downright pissed Hale had managed to catch him off guard, but where he should be writhing and choking and seconds from death thanks to the extra hole blown into him, he really only felt the mild discomfort that came from inhaling water down the wrong pipe.
Almost gently, Death helped stand him up straight and even reached out and caught his elbow when he swayed uncertainly. "You'll live." The entity decided after a quick once over.
Somewhere at their back, Harry could hear the repeated shots of Hale's weapon as she fought off the surrounding shades, but he knew her inventory was limited, and he was much more interested in Death than the small threat she or any of the others posed.
He caught Death by the forearms, ran his hands up to his shoulders wonderingly. He was always able to touch him, despite Death's inability to manifest himself on the mortal plane, but there was something different about him now, something present, he wasn't existing halfway in another world.
He spat a mouthful of a blood, took a test gargle, and realized speech wasn't that far out of his capabilities. "You're here," he rasped.
"You're stronger." Death hummed, he seemed pleased by this realization. "And your baron is getting away."
Wonder momentarily forgotten, Harry strangled out a curse and, sure enough, found Strucker halfway across the room already, surrounded by his own personal guard.
His pain would have to wait, as would the revelation that Death was there. And for the second time that day, Harry pushed himself into the throng of writhing bodies. Down the center of the aisle was his clearest path to Strucker, but he used the word clear very lightly. His shades had made quick and bloody work of the weaker of the techs; pools of tacky blood, dismembered limbs, and entire corpses made for serious tripping hazards and the ones who'd survived had armed themselves with makeshift weapons and were swinging them around with very little precision. Ten seconds into the mess and Harry had ducked no less than three chair leg clubs, almost been strangled by an extension cord, and was nearly brained by a wildly flung keyboard.
His shades didn't bleed, they couldn't be wounded or killed, but the agents seemed to have realized that their connection to the living plane and corporeality was very fine. All it took was enough blunt force to a normal human's weak point- the head, the chest, the throat- and they were shattered from existence. They were easy to remove, even the lesser of the combat trained were taking them out easy, but what they lacked in strength they more than made up for in numbers. One shade dissipated and ten more took its place, and they were rabid. No matter how easily these HYDRA agents were able to handle them one on one, it would only be a matter of time before they were overwhelmed by just how many souls there were.
Harry stalked down the aisle, nimbly leaping over overturned office furniture and mutilated corpses, Strucker was only a few meters ahead, barely halfway across the room, and his shades parted easy for him. He could get to the baron before he managed to slip away.
But then a shade stumbled into his path, a former secret service agent with the bottom half of his jaw torn clean off. Harry had half a second to observe the roadblock, before a bullet from behind tore him from existence. The shade dissipated into an iridescent mist and in his place, Harry found himself facing the snarling face and close shaved head of his favorite HYDRA guard: Coleman.
He looked in bad shape, he was favoring his left leg pretty heavily, the right one dragging uselessly behind him and his face had been torn into, clawing marks starting at his forehead and stretching all the way to the underside of his chin. His eyeball was missing, nothing but a meaty, red mess and his lip was drooping oddly. But he still had enough strength to snarl at Harry and spit the worst curse and a mouthful of blood right at his feet.
"You almost had it," the man hissed, barely audible over the sounds of his comrades being torn apart. "The finish was right there. But pride had to get in the way of all the glory we could have brought you. Now all you'll have is pain." His gun was gone, probably long since out of bullets, but he produced a baton as long as Harry forearm from his belt, and when he pressed a button at its base it crackled with electricity. "I warned you what would happen if you betrayed us. And now-"
Harry flicked his wrist. The baton bent into an unnatural angle and the tip made solid contact with Coleman's chest, his body shook under the full force of his own weapon's electricity until he fell backward with a meaty thud and didn't move.
"Sorry," Harry said insincerely as he stepped over the smoking body. "It's just, we've already had way too much monologuing today and I'm on a bit of a time crunch."
Strucker hadn't made it much further during his brief distraction, his entire cohort had been stopped maybe ten meters from the door by a particularly aggressive cluster of shades. But he'd been joined by what remained of STRIKE (which was most of them) and every now and then Harry caught a glimpse of a dark mask and long hair that confirmed the voiceless soldier was still around and doing damage.
Under his silent command, the shades parted, allowing him a mostly clear path directly down the aisle. He focused his magic, ignored the tug of not quite exhaustion, and conjured a hail of flames to scatter their neat formation. As the men on the frontlines screamed and tried frantically to put themselves out, Harry charged. He didn't have much of plan besides kill the guards and get to Strucker, but with the Heart backing his every move, he didn't need much more than that.
The first guard he met was armed only with a set of brass knuckles on each hand, perfect for bashing in shade heads, but useless against the half-powered shield Harry conjured.
"I told them," the man panted around a stitch in his side, "you were fucking creepy. I didn't trust you."
Harry smiled. "Good call." He summoned the short knife from the man's belt and plunged it into his throat. The severance of his soul washed over him immediately, a cool balm of death that energized his aching limbs, then he turned to face the next two. The floor beneath the two charging agents went suddenly immaterial, sucking them up to their waists before solidifying again. His shades fell on them immediately, a crowd so thick Harry couldn't even witness what he was sure would be a bloody demise.
After that came another familiar face, Bennet with a still armed rifle that tore holes into Harry's underprepared shield and made him fall back a few steps. A dozen shades stepped between them, taking the hail of bullets meant for Harry; they tore through them with ease but gave Harry just enough protection to cross those few meters of space and wrap a hand around Bennet's wrist. Rot spread rapidly from the point of contact, turning the skin first a bloodless white then it went black then it began to loosen, slipping from muscle and bone as it crept higher. An awful smelling liquid burst from his nose and sputtered from his mouth, just barely missing Harry. He didn't stay standing much longer after that, his organs now useless and bones too brittle to keep him upright, when Harry released him he pooled at his feet in a nasty pile of bloated flesh and purge fluids.
There was a pause then, at least ten agents stood between Harry and Strucker, but they'd watched four of their men get mowed down as if it were nothing in a handful of seconds. None of them wanted to be next.
That moment of indecision cost them. In the seconds they spent faltering, Harry summoned Bennet's discarded gun. He wasn't sure it was actually a rifle, the weight of the weapon, the length of the magazine, and its sleek build convinced Harry and the little he knew about guns that this was something much more powerful, but the idea was all the same. The barrel aimed the same way the few guns he'd held in the past did, the trigger was right where it should be, and when he squeezed it, the conveniently frozen HYDRA goons were mowed down same as he'd seen hundreds of times before.
He cut through their ranks with a lazy sweep of the gun and when the magazine clicked empty, he faced the handful still standing with a feral grin.
There were seven left, then four when three broke off to stand back-to-back with Strucker (who'd armed himself and was holding his own actually pretty admirably). Harry recognized Rumlow, his right hand man with the slicked back hair (Rollins they called him), and two men whose identities really didn't matter seeing as they'd be dead in a few minutes. They must have run out of bullets already, but they were armed, the two goons with the same electric batons that had killed Coleman, Rumlow a pair of wicked sharp knives, and Rollins with a longer, machete like weapon.
The four of them descended on him at once, but Harry was no stranger to being grossly outmanned in a fight. He pulled shades into his orbit with ease, using their bodies as shields against the frenzy of sharpened blades and crackling batons. Rumlow still managed to score a blow in the first few seconds though, a wild swing parted the skin from Harry's right shoulder to his left hip, revealing glistening muscle below.
Over his hiss of pain, there was a tsk of disapproval. "That's twice now you've been blooded by these mortals," Death scolded, he stalked along the edges of the fight, watching without making any move to step in. "Are you a god or are you not?"
"I'm still getting the hang of all this," Harry panted, just barely avoiding earning another stab wound, this time to his semi-exposed heart.
"That's not how this works, any of it. Your power is innate, the more you think about it, the worse you'll do."
"Now I can't help but to think about it."
"Kid you're fucking insane," Rumlow growled. And yeah, maybe to him the one-sided conversation during a fight to the death might look that way, but Harry still took offense.
Magic pooled around his fist and instead of releasing it through a spell, he used it to power the punch he aimed right at the center of Rumlow's chest. He heard ribs crack, but the man kept on his feet.
"You can hit harder than that, quark."
The next one shattered the bones in Rollin's wrist, forcing him to switch his grip to his off hand.
"Better. Still not enough."
A baton made burning contact with Harry's side.
"You're still allowing yourself to be bound by mortal limitations. You're faster than these men, greater in every way, why do you let them beat you?"
Around the room the shades howled Harry's pain, and the momentary distraction they made gave him the half second advantage he needed to use a severing charm to cut his attackers throat.
"Have you ever known a mortal to outpace Death?"
Harry grunted when the tip of Rumlow's knife dug into the muscles in his shoulder.
"To match me blow for blow? No? Because they tried and I consumed their souls."
He batted the knife away, sending it skittering along the floor along with a good chunk of his shoulder.
"You're not outnumbered here, quark. Their training, their numbers, their physical strength does not give them the advantage. You exist for this."
Harry ducked under the blazing arc of the second baton, he used his lower position to ram his shoulder into its wielders gut and sent the agent flying into the crowd of waiting shades. He didn't wait to listen as he was torn apart.
"You were made for this carnage, this death. Only one is better than you at inflicting it, and I am here in your ear."
Death's words were a shot of adrenaline, an elixir of confidence, the too big power of the Heart that he so clumsily wielded flowed from him now. It lightened his step, healed his gaping wounds as they were cut into him, and made every move powerful, purposeful.
Quickly, he fell off the defensive, stopped blocking their blows and started meeting them, exceeding them, until the two remaining agents began to falter.
"A growing boy is a weak boy, and you have much growing to do. But until then, I'll guide you, I'll show you the patience you require until you find your own strength and prove yourself worthy of my name."
Harry caught the two-handed swing of Rumlow's knife, aimed right for his gut, and twisted until he heard cartilage pop. But he let himself be distracted and just a second too late noticed Rollins swinging his wide blade at his exposed neck.
Too late to duck, and hands still occupied, he could do nothing but hope coming back from decapitation didn't mean growing a whole new head, because that would just suck. But a second before the blade made contact, Harry felt a shift, like the cool discomfort of a disillusionment spell. And then the blade swung right through him.
Through him.
And not in the sense that it tore through skin and all the important viscera beneath, but actually passed through him the same way his touch did a ghost.
Rollins blinked.
Harry lunged.
His intangible hand sunk into the man's chest, groped around for a familiar, pulsing organ, and then he willed himself back into existence. He knew it worked when an uncomfortably snug, wet heat wrapped around his hand, but he allowed the discomfort only a second to register before he tore his hand back and, with it, Rollins' heart, straight from the chest.
It was still beating. He thought that was only a thing in movies, but the lump of shining red muscle pulsed rhythmically in his hand even after being disconnected from its owner.
Right up until Harry crushed it in his fist.
It was a largely symbolic gesture, Rollins was dead, had been from the moment a fist reverse punched itself from his chest. But the impossible sight of Harry and his twig little arms pulverizing an entire human heart to chunky jelly was enough to make even the fearless STRIKE lead hesitate. It was just them now, the best men HYDRA had to offer were scattered in bloody scraps at their feet and, unless he had a truly impressive defense he'd been saving for the last, last moment, it wouldn't be long before Rumlow joined them.
Turns out he did.
Before Harry could make him into another smear on the red soaked concrete, Rumlow took a healthy step back and allowed another to step up for him. The masked soldier.
Like one of Harry's specters, he materialized from the carnage, and approached Harry with a steady gait and not an ounce of fear. He was completely unarmed, there wasn't even a pocketknife on his person, but when they met in the middle, metal arm against firm protego, it was with a horrible clash.
Harry didn't know this man's story, didn't even know his name, but he'd thought just the other day that the two of them were alike, both broken toys tethered to the immoral. He'd empathized with the man, the boy hero in him had even entertained the thought of freeing him right along with all the others, but he was standing as the only thing between Harry and Strucker, an uncountable amount of time in imprisonment and freedom at last. And, willing pawn of HYDRA or not, Harry would take out anything that stood between him and his long-earned freedom.
It was unfortunate, but pretty on par for his luck, that Harry finally found a real opponent in this soldier. Harry had the raw power and the fury to fuel every attack, but the soldier had speed, dexterity, strength, and a terrifying skill. His metal arm voided Harry's necrotic touch, superhuman reflexes kept him gliding between the spaces of starbright spells, and just a blow from his bare fist didn't kill, but it winded, and it slowed. And for the first (and least opportune) time that day, Death was silent. Harry could still see him, lurking on the edges of the fight, but he didn't have a word of advice to toss into the ring. Which was just rude, in his opinion, hours of unhelpful commentary and Death chose the moment he was getting his arse handed to him to suddenly hold his peace.
A string of missed and/or dodged spells put the soldier too close into Harry's orbit, and a boot right in the center of his chest was consequence. Harry went flying, he willed the shades behind him to slow his fall and only felt the chilly press of one or two rather than the dozens he could manipulate just a few minutes earlier. He was wearing down, was starting to feel the drain of magic it took to keep this many souls tethered to the physical plane.
Are you a god, or not, Death had asked. And maybe in theory he should be. With all the might of the Heart his to control there was no doubt he was the most powerful person in this room, but his body hadn't yet caught up to the fact. It was working overtime already, but these were less than ideal conditions, and there was only so much his half-mortal body could accomplish in the short notice he'd given it.
So he couldn't really be blamed for taking just a half second to languish on the concrete where his shades had clumsily deposited him, and he felt the metal fist aimed right for his forehead was a fair trade off for that bit of indulgence. He had enough energy to roll out of the way just millimeters before his head was cracked open like a melon, then aiming a blasting hex into the soldier's chest, right in the same spot he'd kicked him. Fair was fair.
Like his ally before him, a pack of shades were waiting to engulf the soldier the moment Harry knocked him back, but a messy death by shade would have been going too easy on Harry. The soldier fought with the full fury of hell, shades on every side but he tore them apart, literally rended limbs from ghostly torsos with one flesh, one metal arm.
"There's no way he's human," Harry complained, mostly to himself. While the soldier was weaving between a dozen grasping hands with an enviable grace, he could barely get his own feet back under him. This had truly been a trying day. And it wasn't close to over. His shades had done a wonderful job cutting down the number of HYDRA in the room, but clusters of survivors remained and they were carving their own casualties into his ranks. Through their dwindled numbers Harry could see Strucker among the most effective clusters, still on their steady path for the exit. He was close, too close for Harry's comfort, if he didn't make it past this final gatekeeper Strucker would be in the wind and the chances of finding him again down to zero.
So, despite the way every part of his body protested the action, Harry roped an accio around the soldier's ankle. He was yanked off his feet by the momentum, dragged past the border of his notably smaller wall of shades, but recovered quick enough to plant his metal arm into the ground. The concrete crumbled under his touch, his fingers tore grooves into the stone until he had enough of a handhold to pull himself counter of the spell. He stopped his motion in just enough time to land Harry's eviscerating hex between his two spread legs rather than in the gut he'd been aiming for.
"Definitely not human," Harry cursed, and then the soldier tackled him. One second he was stretched out on the ground just a yard away, and then he was kicking to his feet and on Harry like a hungry hound.
The grace Harry had been admiring in the soldier was gone now, part of Harry wondered if he was angry, or maybe he was starting to feel the burn of fatigue too, because his blows were wild, brutal, thrown with no finesse but still enough force to break. They tumbled over each other, got tangled in each other's limbs, blocking and blowing. Harry tried a necrotizing touch, but only managed to turn just a patch of skin purple-black before he was releasing to block a rain of blows. The few spells he had enough mind to cast, a skin flaying hex, a myriad of cutting curses, actual bursts of intense cold and blue fire went ignored. All he could do was roll and punch and try not to let either of the soldier's punishing fists land with too much accuracy.
There was no finesse to it, no strategy, or really any skill at all. In this tumble of limbs and mess of flying fists and half formed spells they'd been reduced to their most basic of instincts, to hit and hit and hit until the enemy submitted. This was an uncoordinated, almost primal battle of wills. Except the two wills at war…shouldn't be. They were both victims of HYDRA, stripped of their identity and autonomy, this man didn't want to be here anymore than Harry did, otherwise HYDRA wouldn't have gone to such lengths to muzzle and chain him. Their only difference was Harry was lucky enough to be saddled with the fragments of some primordial space rock that gave him the juice to crack his conditioning, the soldier didn't have such an out. And yeah Harry might not have done the best back in school, but not even he was so dim as to miss the irony of the situation, this desperate fight between the two of them, the man he was and the man he could have been. It was downright Shakespearean.
But maybe that was how he was meant to end this horrible chapter of his life, by killing this manifestation of his worst traumas. The soldier hadn't personally wronged him, any actions of his were a direct reflection of HYDRA and his handlers, not his own will. But Harry had already made himself the promise that no one was stopping him from breaking free from HYDRA today, and he'd long since come to terms with the fact that not everyone could be saved, that sometimes innocent people died, sometimes he had to be the one to kill them. It was ugly and messy, but he'd long ago let go of the naïve idea that the world was kind.
He was down to the last in his tank, stretching the reserves of his energy way past where they should be, but Harry couldn't feel the ache of fatigue anymore, just the cool, calm of his decision to end this.
He flipped them, he managed to roll their entwined bodies so that for one perfect moment he towered over the soldier. That metal arm was pinned awkwardly beneath the soldier's back, while Harry's knee dug into the wrist of his right arm. It wouldn't take but a second for the larger man to buck out of the weak hold, but Harry needed only half of that to cast a curse.
He'd lost his borrowed wand some time ago, but he hadn't really needed one in a long time. He directed the wild ebb of his magic to the palm of his hand, that distinctive green light shone from between his fingers as he aimed for the spot just to the left of the soldier's chest, and then-
"Maybe, we don't do that."
Death took Harry's wrist and the killing curse died under his touch.
"What are you doing?" A current of burning betrayal swept through him when his shades (his shades!) acted outside his command and dragged Harry backward, away from the fallen soldier. The masked man scrambled to his feet, but didn't make it a step in either direction before Death put a hand on his shoulder that stopped him moving entirely. He reached for the mask covering the bottom half of his face. It was stuck on there tight, but an easy tug and Death tore it free with the snap of broken buckles as he said, "I just thought you might not want to kill this one, is all."
It took a minute. Harry processed each newly revealed feature of the soldier's face individually, a separate part not yet belonging to a whole. But then the cleft chin sparked a hint of familiarity, the dusting of stubble on a clenched jaw brought to mind a Brooklyn drawl lamenting the lack of a proper razor, and he realized he knew the gunmetal eyes, even if they were colder than he'd ever seen them, and the dark brown hair longer than it had ever been allowed to grow. The individual pieces slotted themselves into a familiar and impossible mosaic of his past.
Harry wrenched free from the shades' hold, staggered forward on loose legs until he was close, too close. "Bucky?"
Teeth bared in a snarl and he remembered even those, too bright, too perfect in a face always smudged in mud and bruises.
"The hell is a bucky?"
Harry whirled on Death. "You knew who he was? You let me fight him!"
But his guardian entity shrugged. "I'm not omnipotent. His soul felt familiar, but I didn't know."
Didn't know that the masked soldier was Bucky Barnes. Harry could only gape at the man, who by all rights should be dead, as he felt the room spin around him. This was too much. First Steve just a few hours ago, and now this. Sure, as Death's protegee he should be used to interacting with the dead by now, but those dead were actually dead, not inexplicably living, breathing remnants of his past now working unwillingly for HYDRA and looking the exact age they'd been before Harry had been taken from the war.
And he'd nearly killed him, his fingers were still chilled from the curse he'd been fractions of moments from casting on his friend.
Harry could feel the beginnings of hysteria creeping in on him. His aching ribs screamed every time he pulled in a too short, too quick breath. And was the ceiling getting lower? Were the walls pushing in tighter? The world might actually be ending. Or at least this corner of it.
But then the impending Armageddon was halted when his head jerked to the side, then just a second later, a stinging pain registered across the right side of his face. Death had just…slapped him?
"What…?"
Death had released Bucky (Bucky!), left him unguarded right on the edge of the otherwise occupied shades while he jolted Harry from his meltdown. He came back to awareness just in time to watch whatever power that had frozen Bucky melt away as he took one hesitant step backward.
"Wait, no!"
Harry rushed forward, reaching for Bucky, and like a wild animal he bolted. Without an ounce of fear, he threw himself back into the pack of rabid shades and began cutting himself a path away from Harry.
He made to pursue, and even managed to make it three whole steps before Death was circling a hand around his forearm like an iron band. "Control yourself." The entity growled, giving him a rough little shake when he refused to let up. "I didn't show his face so that you might embarrass us all with this little panic attack. I'm sick of your moping and I knew if you killed your friend, you'd be an annoying ball of misery for at least a decade and I…just can't."
"But he's getting away!"
"Let him. He's a danger and a distraction, you can't protect him in this chaos. Let him go and we'll find him later, I'll help you. But right now, we have a mission. Focus."
Right. The mission. Strucker. If he didn't get himself together immediately the man would be gone, never to be seen until the absolute least opportune moment. He had to stop him now or spend the next however many years looking constantly over his shoulder.
But Bucky was getting away.
He could see his dark head, methodically making his way further and further away. Headed for the same exit everyone was clawing tooth and nail to reach. The same exit Strucker was headed for. He'd get there first, he was nearly there already, Harry knew he could stop him if he had the time, but he didn't. It was one or the other. Bucky or Strucker. He couldn't have them both.
He whined low in his throat, angry and stressed and full of desperate resentment, but he made his decision. He turned his back, didn't watch as Bucky reached the edge of the chaos, managed to grab hold of the door, and worm his way to freedom. No, his attention was back to the task at hand, if he wanted this over, nothing could distract him.
Nearly half his shades were still standing, there were at least a hundred of them to the twenty-something left of Strucker and Pierce's men. But of the analysts, hackers, and guards locked in with Harry and his host, these were the fighters, the ones smart enough to avoid engaging Harry one on one and resourceful enough to continue taking on the slew of shades even after their bullets ran out. And Harry was exhausted, and the integrity of his shades suffered from it; they were blurring around the edges and it didn't even take a direct hit to dissolve them anymore.
In the sorry state both sides were in, it was going to be down to yet another game of who could outlast the other. But Harry had things to do, freedoms to seize, he didn't have the patience to let this just play out. He was ready for this long, awful day to be over. Of the hundred shades left, Harry cut ninety of them, then turned the energy used to fuel them onto his final ten.
"Get him."
From all ends of the hall, his shades converged. They found Strucker and latched onto every available limb, torso, shoulder until he was too weighed down to move, just steps from the exit.
Of course, that left HYDRA's fighters without something to fight. Ninety percent of his attacking force literally blinking from existence had been enough to stop them in their tracks for a second, maybe even two, but already they were beginning to regain their composure, to turn their focus onto the next opponent. That, of course, being Harry himself.
He didn't give them a chance.
"Imperius."
The cloud of compliance he literally breathed into the air as he spoke that once hated spell was the most soothing bit of magic Harry had cast all day. There was something peaceful in the way it curled around the room in a gentle mist, wormed itself around and through the twenty-seven soldiers left standing, and bled all the tension and fear from their postures.
Even when he ordered them to turn on each other, even when they attacked, ripping into their comrades with bare hands and teeth, their faces were slack with bliss. They were the happiest looking corpses Harry had made all day.
And then there was just one left.
The One.
Just Strucker facing Harry, with no more tricks up his sleeves.
"Bring him here."
The cocoon of shades split down the center, and a young woman who appeared strangely unmangled but most definitely dead dragged the baron to stand before Harry. He didn't cower or attempt to shy away from the blood-soaked stare Harry leveled on him, but something in Stucker's expression looked distinctly…heartbroken.
"This is it then?" His voice just barely trembled under the weight of his grief. "The end to everything we worked for?"
In direct contrast, Harry spoke without a hitch, almost eerily calm. "There is no we. You tricked yourself into believing, but I was never yours to have."
The shadow of Death rested over his shoulder, Harry watched as Strucker's eyes tracked over it, wondered what he saw to make him go that pale, or make him tremble quite so violently.
The baron asked for the second time that day, "What is this?"
It was such a sweet feeling, returning every mockingly genial, falsely loving smile Strucker had bestowed on him. Harry reached for him, and the man didn't try to struggle, couldn't even if he wanted to as he caught his hand, reeled him in gentle and slow, and put a palm to his chest.
"True power."
Finding Strucker's soul was the easiest thing Harry had ever done. It knew him, better than any soul he'd ever encountered, because the two of them had forged a bond, one borne from the iron of Harry's blood and the irrepressible inferno of Strucker's fanaticism. When Harry reached for it, the soul came to him eagerly, twining itself in the spaces between his fingers like a particularly sweet adder. It was colored the same shade as smoldering charcoal, a mix of deep gray and light ash on the surface with cracks of burning red marbled all around, and cool to touch. Along every point of contact Harry's skin tingled with the refreshing chill of it.
Harry stared up into Strucker's face, watched as his complexion went the color of soured yoghurt, as pearls of sweat beaded along his forehead, and his lips went flat and bloodless with the efforts to contain a burbling scream. Harry dug into him viciously, sending the salivating maws of his magic foraging for every piece of his soul anchored into the space of his ribs, burrowed deep in the chambers of his heart.
Strucker raised a hand to press against Harry's face, he shook it off the first time, but it found a new place at his shoulder and he realized the baron wasn't trying to push him away or fight him, he was pulling him closer. His other hand pawed at the back of Harry's head, clumsy but with no intent to harm, and even on breaths that warbled with agony he managed to sound reverent. "You claim you are not one of us?" Glassy eyes swept over the hall, at the carnage he'd made of their entire operation "You are the very best of us." He leaned in so close, their noses brushed. "Hail Hydra."
Harry abandoned all grace and tore his soul from his chest. It resisted, attempted to anchor itself deep where it belonged, but against him it lasted seconds.
Strucker was still alive when he released him, but there was nothing behind his gaze when he dropped into a crouch right there at Harry's feet, hands scrabbling uselessly at the ground around him.
Harry eyed him dispassionately. "He'll live?"
Death hummed, long and low, observing the husk of a man from his new favored place draped across Harry's back. "Not for long," he said. "Mortals can survive without a soul inhabiting their suits, you've seen it before, but it's a short and miserable existence."
"Good."
And finally, in the silence and the stillness, Harry closed his eyes, he drew in a full, deep breath, and allowed his weight to sink back onto Death. It almost wasn't a surprise anymore to find him a fully solid presence behind him, physically there in a way he'd never been. He certainly didn't take the time then to consider how it was even possible, he just relished in the relief of finally being able to take the weight off of his aching body.
"How did I do?"
Death snorted, an awful, ungraceful, human sound. "Surprisingly adequate."
And Harry laughed. He ignored the burning in his bones, forgot the corpses surrounding him, and the shaking that had taken over his entire body, and he laughed and laughed until he was choking on his tears.
"Fuck you."
A/N: And there it is, after almost a year this monster is finally out in the world and we're onto the final arc of this story! I'll try not to take another year.
